1.
March 12, 1889. Charleston, South Carolina
HE WAKES AS HE IS FALLING.
He feels himself plunging into space, a great wheeling emptiness below. He’s been on the edge of a cliff, grappling with a man trying to shoot him. Dawson grabs him, wrestling for the gun, but he wrenches away, pulling Dawson off-balance. The man presses the gun against Dawson’s chest; he hears the great enveloping sound of the shot. Then he feels the sickening shift beneath his feet as he loses his grip on the world.
As he falls Dawson grabs the man’s shoulder to save himself, but instead pulls the man over with him. They fall together, still grappling, as though holding on to each other will help. Dawson’s body is clenched and tight, muscles still focused on what he just had, solid ground beneath him, but instead there is this: the long drop into whistling black.
Dawson sits up, sweating.
He’s in the narrow bed in his dressing room. His thrashing has pulled the sheets loose, and his feet are now tangled and trapped. The room is dim and shadowy, the curtains drawn for the night. The patterned wallpaper, the tall mahogany bureau, the brass bedstead are all familiar but irrelevant. He’s still in his nightmare, heart hammering. He still feels the terror of pitching into space, the body’s last clenching try at holding on to life. He still feels the man’s coarse sleeve in his grasp, smells his sour rankness. The sound of the gunshot still explodes in his ears.
He kicks his feet free and gets up. He goes through the connecting door into their bedroom, where his wife lies submerged in the big mahogany bed, nearly hidden by pillows.
She lifts her head and sees his face. “What is it?”
The struggle is still running through him. He takes a breath and shakes his head. In his body, it’s still happening. He begins walking up and down the room. This is familiar, too, the mirrored armoire, the high sleigh bed, the dressing table. Also irrelevant in this swift current of feeling.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah sits up, the white nightgown crumpled high around her throat.
“I had a dream,” says Dawson. “A man had a gun and was going to shoot me. I was trying to stop him. We were on the edge of a cliff.” Again he feels himself pitching into emptiness; he can smell the man. “Then he did shoot me, and I fell. I can feel it still.”
The dream possesses him. And some other moment flickers into his mind, when he stood somewhere high, behind him emptiness.
“My poor Frank.” Sarah’s hair is in its nighttime braid, the loosened strands making a fine furred halo around her face.
“What do you think it means?” he asks.
He doesn’t really believe in this—the reading of dreams, second sight, premonitions—but Sarah does. She’s the seventh child of a seventh child, and believes in another realm of perception. Dawson believes there are kinds of knowledge we don’t understand, but he also believes that most people who claim this knowledge are frauds. Sarah is not a fraud. Sometimes her intuitions are uncanny. He’s seen it happen; sometimes she’s attuned to something he can’t explain. Though sometimes she’s wrong.
Right now he wants to rid himself of this feeling, the sickening plunge. He hopes that whatever Sarah says will lessen its power.
“Did you know the man?” Sarah leans forward.
“I’d never seen him before.”
“A stranger,” says Sarah, “trying to harm you. Maybe it’s someone who’s attacking the newspaper?”
Dawson snorts. “The people attacking the paper are quite open about it,” he says. “I know exactly who they are. They don’t need to hire anonymous assassins.”
The dream begins to recede, which is what he’d hoped for, though not like this. Now he’s back in another kind of conflict, the alarms and confusions of daily life.
In daily life Dawson is the editor and part owner of the Charleston News and Courier. He and Bartholomew Riordan bought it twenty years ago, first the News, then the Courier. Dawson was editor in chief, Riordan business manager. Now that Riordan’s gone, Dawson runs more or less everything. The paper has always been his voice. He’s always written the editorials, always had strong opinions, and he has become a kingmaker. His candidates usually win. He was a representative at the Democratic National Convention; he’s a friend of President Cleveland. The News and Courier is one of the most influential newspapers in the South. Dawson thinks privately that it’s the most influential.
He and Riordan met in Richmond, after the war. They were both Catholic, both hardworking, earnest, principled. They trusted and complemented each other. Riordan was quiet and reserved, Dawson bold and forceful. Their mission was to inform and educate. They believed in integrity. They wanted to rebuild the world: the one they’d known was gone.
Dawson wrote daily editorials. He was fast, informed, and opinionated, never afraid to challenge his readers. Riordan scrawled comments in the margins. Is this what we want to say? Sometimes he’d put a query at the head of the whole piece. Sometimes he wrote, Too strong. Sometimes just No. Sometimes Yes! Dawson had relied on his responses; sometimes he changed the piece, sometimes he didn’t, but always he listened.
Three years ago Riordan had left for New York and Dawson had hired his old friend J. C. Hemphill as publisher. Hemphill was trustworthy and experienced, but he never disagreed with Dawson and never asked questions. Last fall he’d left. The new publisher makes no comment at all.
Though Dawson doesn’t really need Riordan. After twenty years he knows how to run a paper. And he knows Charleston; he loves it. He wants to help Charleston move into the larger world; he wants it to thrive.
Dawson believes in God (he’s devout), in education (“A life without Books is death,” he wrote to his younger brother), and in telling the truth. He’s certain of his convictions. He has a vision of Charleston’s future. He wants industry, tourism, railroads, shipping. “Bring the mills to the cotton” is his motto. He is friends with priests, ministers (both black and white), rabbis, policemen. He knows everyone in city politics. He belongs to the exclusive St. Cecilia Society and the populist Hibernian Society. He believes in drawing the community together.
He also believes in the rule of law, and he defends the rights of the freedmen. Once, soon after the war, he’d tried to put Negroes onto the aldermanic ticket. He arranged the first political meeting between colored men and Democrats in Charleston. He’d rented the hall himself, an empty store on Hayne Street, hoping they’d form an alliance. (They hadn’t.) When the big earthquake hit Charleston, three years ago, Dawson led the relief efforts, working with both black and white leaders.
His opinions have made him some enemies. He’s not a native (he was born in England), and his opinions are not always shared by Southerners. Some of his readers don’t want to put the war behind them or give black people political power. Some readers are enraged and accuse Dawson of lying about his rank (captain), his war record (Army of Northern Virginia, Mechanicsville, Gettysburg, served under Longstreet), and his U.S. citizenship (real). He’s been challenged to duels, though he’s denounced dueling and helped to ban it. He’s received death threats, which he ignores. He’s opposed to violence on principle. When he gets a threat he won’t even change his route to the office.
Dawson doesn’t mind all this; he’s certain he’s right. He has Charleston’s best interests at heart. He holds fast, and usually his readers come around. Though when his readers resist too vehemently, or when his candidate loses, Dawson yields and supports the winner. He believes a newspaper should reflect the views of its community. It should lead, but it must also listen.
This has been successful for twenty years, but things have changed, first gradually and now drastically. A group of powerful men, men he used to call his friends, have turned against him. They have founded another newspaper, The Charleston World, which is trying to run him out of business. The World is a year old, and disturbingly popular. It’s cheap, gossipy, and poorly written. Dawson despises it. It’s flourishing. It’s openly hostile to him, mocking his opinions, stealing his staff, undercutting his price, and taking his subscribers. Dawson has had to let reporters go, cut pages, and borrow money. He knows he’ll win in the end, because he has right on his side. He just has to outlast the World, keep going until it fails. The thing is that he’s running out of money.
The problem is a man called Ben Tillman. He’s locked himself onto Dawson like a terrier on an ankle, and Dawson can’t shake him loose. At first Tillman was just a struggling plantation owner from upcountry in Edgefield (they’re all struggling, the farmers all over the South, now that labor is no longer free). Several years earlier Tillman had started by writing fiery letters to the paper, complaining about The Citadel, a military college for planters’ sons. Tillman hated it. He wanted an agricultural college for farmers, instead of an elitist one for rich boys. He was outspoken, energetic, and bold. He simmered with resentment.
Dawson likes controversy. He welcomes new voices and challenging ideas: they make for a good paper. At first Tillman only criticized the school, but his real target was the whole politically powerful Low Country: rich, aristocratic, insular, and exclusionary. Tillman suggested that they meet, and when Dawson agreed, he swore him to secrecy. They met in a remote country inn. There they adopted a strategy: Dawson would support Tillman’s agricultural college if Tillman would stop attacking The Citadel. Tillman told Dawson to criticize him a bit, in order to keep the alliance secret. He’d consider the attacks “love licks”: a light battering by someone who loves you.
Later Dawson saw that Tillman had been planning his strategy from the start. The secrecy was to protect Tillman from accusations of collusion. It had been Dawson who’d given Tillman prominence, publishing his voice in The News and Courier, with one of the largest circulations in the Cotton States. By the time he began his attacks on Dawson, Tillman had a following. Tillman wanted political power, and one way he planned to get it was by bringing down the famous Frank Dawson.
Tillman is now known throughout the South, and his rallies draw big crowds of angry white men. They’ve all lost the world they once knew, these men. Tillman tells them to blame Dawson, their enemy, the voice of Charleston, heart of the Low Country. Tillman calls him a political manipulator, the Lord High Executioner. Tillman claims that Dawson and a circle of his friends control state politics; he calls Dawson the leader of “Ring Rule.” Tillman’s a white supremacist, a Fire-Eater. His world has been destroyed by war and emancipation, and he resents this. Tillman wants Redemption, which will obliterate Reconstruction. The Fire-Eaters hate the fact that Negroes are now free. They hate the fact that these men can now vote. They want to put power back in the hands of white people.
Tillman himself was intelligent and articulate. He’d had a classical education, though he’d had to drop out of school because of the war. He resented that, too.
* * *
NOW THE EARLIER MOMENT comes back to Dawson, the fear of falling. It was when he faced the crowd at City Hall: he remembers looking out over the brilliance of the torches, the high cavernous darkness beyond. He’d stepped up onto the base of the balustrade, setting his feet between the balusters, gripping the railing. Tillman had introduced him with a sneer. That mocking introduction invited the first catcall from the crowd, which was primed for it.
Gentlemen, Dawson began, but they would not let him finish. Ring Rule, they shouted. Each time he spoke there were more catcalls. He kept talking, but he began to realize that they would shout him down. He felt fear enter him, not physical, but some other kind, at being silenced, erased. He felt the crowd’s hostility rise toward him, huge and gusty, like a hot wind.
As he began to speak he’d leaned out over the railing, but as the shouts overrode his voice and uncertainty entered him, he lost his sense of balance. For a moment it seemed that if he stepped backward he’d plunge into deep nothingness. It comes back to him now.
* * *
HE’LL PUT ALL THIS away from him. Dawson stands in the doorway in his nightshirt and puts a hand on the solid hump of his belly. Light seeps into the room in long fiery shafts through the gaps between the curtains. His body is calming, and its big engines—the heart, the lungs—are slowing. It’s morning, light is filling the room and the city. He marshals his own forces—reason, certainty, vitality—against those of fear and darkness.
He’s working for Charleston. He doesn’t care if public opinion is against him now, it’s happened before. He has always prevailed.
Dawson is forty-eight years old, hale and energetic, in his prime. He’s five foot nine, a bit portly, actually, though he thinks of himself as strong. Powerful. Blue-eyed and fair-skinned, a broad forehead, straight thick nose, a firm mouth and forceful gaze. Thick wavy brown hair that refuses to lie flat, a long but sparse mustache curling down over his lip. During the war he couldn’t raise a mustache, and now he sports a long one, to make up. He gives his belly an affirming pat.
Sarah puts her legs over the side of the bed and slides her white feet into her slippers.
“I had a strange dream, too,” she says.
She stands, putting on her thin silk robe. She takes her long braid in both hands, lifts it from inside the robe and drops it outside, down her back. Her hair is thick and honey-colored. The sight of her two-handed gesture, the toppling braid, touches Dawson with its intimacy.
Sarah is in his life. Every day he watches her handling the soft honey-colored braid, putting on her worn slippers. Lifting her chin when she disagrees, pursing her lips when she tries not to laugh. He feels a wave of gratitude.
“Tell me about your dream.” He feels protective now.
Sarah goes to the window and pulls back the heavy portieres, and a wide shaft of light enters the room. The sheer inner curtains blur the view of Bull Street, tree-lined. A shrimp woman calls outside, walking slowly, Raw shrimp, raw shrimp.
Sarah turns. “My dream was that a woman dressed all in black was scattering burning coals on the floor in the parlor.” She’s entering the dream again. “You and I were walking on them, in our bare feet. The bottoms of our feet were burning. I could smell the scorched flesh.”
“And what does your dream mean?” Dawson asks.
He’s only being courteous now; the dreamworld is subsiding. Beyond the railing are high branches, the leaves spring-green, stirring in the early breeze. Mourning doves, invisible, purr to each other their secret messages. From below comes the slow rhythmic clop of hooves, the grinding of cart wheels. The shrimp woman is coming closer. Sarah opens the curtains at the other window and the room is now full of light. Nothing, now, suggests that drop into blackness. He’s back in this world.
“It means that a woman will make trouble for us,” says Sarah darkly, and turns to face him.
Sarah is small, with delicate bones. High forehead, straight nose, low straight brows. Her skin is very white, her eyes a pale fiery blue. She has the gaze of a visionary.
“Never,” says Dawson firmly. “No woman can make trouble for us.” They’ve been married for fifteen years, and he has been in love with her since he first saw her, coming out onto the porch at Hampton’s. “Who did she look like?” he asks; Sarah always asks this.
“Sue Covington,” Sarah says, broodingly.
This makes him laugh. Sue Covington is an old friend of Sarah’s from Louisiana, a tiny energetic woman with snapping eyes and a pointed nose. He can’t picture her scattering coals in their parlor.
“My darling chuck-chuck,” he says, “I promise that Sue Covington will never come between us.”
Now Sarah laughs, too. “I’m glad.”
He takes her in his arms. She’s small and light. Her shoulder blades shift beneath his hand, her hair smells thick and yeasty. When they draw back she looks up at him, smiling.
Fear has subsided. The little slipper chair where Sarah lays her robe for the night, the silver brush and comb on her dressing table, the wide wash of sun across the patterned carpet: all this is now more real than the shadowy terrors of the night.
“Have the children left yet?” he asks.
“Hélène’s taken them to school,” Sarah says.
Marie-Hélène Burdayron is the Swiss girl who lives with them. Ethel is fourteen, Warrington, ten. Sarah and the children spent two years in Europe, because Dawson wanted them to have fluency in French and a good Catholic education. Sarah wouldn’t let them go alone. When she came back, Sarah brought home the French-speaking girl. They call her Hélène, and they love her. Hélène has meals with the family; she’s treated almost as a daughter. She lost her own mother when she was a teenager. The children go now to a local school; Hélène takes them each morning and picks them up.
“Ethel came in earlier. She was upset because she couldn’t find her schoolbooks,” Sarah says. “You were asleep, but you still had something to say about it.”
She teases him about talking in his sleep. He enjoys her teasing; she’s the only one who does it. At the paper he’s stern. Now that Riordan has gone he has no one to laugh at him.
“You asked me what was the matter,” she says. “You said she’d be late for school. But you were completely asleep.”
“Well, it’s true,” Dawson says, laughing, defending his vulnerable sleeping self. “She would be.”
“You’re right,” she says. “Even in your sleep you’re right.”
He laughs again; she is his boon companion.
Dawson lives in two worlds. The world at the newspaper is noisy, vigorous, fractious, demanding. When he’s there his energy goes outward. He writes letters and editorials and comments and checks, makes decisions, responds to readers, job seekers, politicians, landowners, churchmen. The mayor and the councilmen. He has boundless energy, and he relishes all this.
His other world is here, where the household moves smoothly around him. Sarah makes sure of this. She makes sure that the children get to school, the garden flourishes, the meals are prompt and hot. This is his private kingdom, these his adored subjects. The children: Ethel, with her fine limp hair and pointed nose, her ethereal blue gaze, high-strung and melodramatic. Warrington, frail and hollow-chested, bookish, anxious. Dawson plays games with them, teaches them songs, takes them to the theater and to the opera. He’s taught Warrington to sail. They all have dinner together every afternoon; Dawson asks them about their day, asks their opinions.
The Dawson house stands on a little rise, in the middle of two lots. Unlike most Charleston houses it faces the street: this is why Sarah loves it. It’s three stories high, handsome white stucco, with white columns along the front of what Sarah would call the galerie, Charlestonians the verandah or the piazza, and the rest of the world the porch.
It was Sarah who’d bought the house, ten years ago, with the last of her family inheritance. It has high ceilings, bay windows, a pair of vast cloudy mirrors set in the parlor walls. They’d put in all the modern things: gas lights, running water, telephones. The bedrooms are on the third floor. Hélène lives up there with them, in a room reached through Warrington’s.
Now Sarah’s little French clock strikes a tiny silvery chime: eight thirty, time to enter the day. Dawson goes back to his dressing room.
He usually sleeps here, though he may be drawn to the larger bed by ardor. In the evenings he works here, reading or writing, until midnight or later. Sarah sits with him, reading or sewing, in the red plush armchair. Often they discuss what he is working on. Sarah has a formidable memory; he calls her his encyclopedia. She’s well-read and opinionated. While Dawson was courting her (which took him a full year) he persuaded her to write for the paper. She was reluctant: she disliked public scrutiny, and it was unseemly to write for money. Dawson reminded her that George Eliot wrote for money. But Sarah didn’t think her writing was any good. She said she’d throw each page on the floor as she wrote it, and if he wished to pick them up he was welcome. This made Dawson laugh. He said he’d be glad to pick them up.
She wrote under a pen name. That first piece was about the taxes in Louisiana, and how they were ruining the landowners. His readers loved it, and everyone began trying to guess her identity. She wrote lively pieces about social issues, and gained a following. But she never liked the deadlines, and she hated the attention. After they were married she stopped.
In the mornings the children have usually left for school when Dawson comes down. He has breakfast with Sarah and they go to the office together. When they take the buggy he drives down and she drives back. If she’s going shopping afterward they take the big phaeton, and then Isaac drives. When Frank comes home for dinner sometimes Sarah drives down to pick him up, and sometimes he takes the tram, which comes up Rutledge Avenue to the corner of Bull Street. Most of Charleston has dinner at three, but the Dawsons have it at four, because it suits Frank better. They all sit down together, Frank and Sarah, the children and Hélène. Afterward Dawson naps or works until six or six thirty, then goes back to the office. At ten he comes home for a late supper with Sarah.
This room is part dressing room, part study. It holds a desk and bookcases, his armoire, the narrow brass bed, the red plush chair where he sits to put on his socks, the marble washstand. On the bedside table is Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. He likes to read novels before going to sleep, likes shifting his mind into someone else’s world, letting his own drop away. A life without books is death.
He’s just begun this book and wishes he could talk about it with Courtenay, who is the most well-read man he knows, and one of his oldest friends in Charleston. Before the war William Ashmead Courtenay and his brother ran a bookstore and publishing business; he’d introduced Dawson to many Southern writers, in print and in person. Then Courtenay went into politics and became mayor, so he and Dawson became political allies as well as literary colleagues. But now Dawson can’t ask Courtenay about this book: they are no longer friends. In fact, it seems they are enemies, over a misunderstanding that has become fixed, apparently irrevocable.
Courtenay was mayor three years ago, on November 10, the twentieth anniversary of Dawson’s arrival in Charleston. Dawson was alone that day; Sarah and the children were in Europe. A heavy wooden case arrived from the mayor’s office. The case was lined with purple satin, swathing an ornate silver tea set, chased with flowery designs. A handwritten letter thanked Dawson for his services to the city. It was signed by Courtenay and twenty officials. Dawson read and reread the card from his friend.
That Christmas he spent at the office, since his family was away. He’d sent presents to his family, and had given presents to everyone at the paper; he’d even bought presents for the children of his best reporter, Carlyle McKinley. He gave most of the staff the day off so they could spend it with their families. It was a dreary day, and to keep himself busy he went to City Hall. Reading the minutes, he found some planned tax increases. Property owners had been devastated by the earthquake, and he knew they couldn’t afford any raises. Dawson was aware that the city had considered this, and he was on the watch. When he saw the plans he wrote a stern warning about them in the paper. Courtenay wrote Dawson a furious note, saying the figures were not official and should never have been made public. But Courtenay was famously tetchy, and if the tax figures were not real, why were they written in the margins of the agenda? It was Dawson’s job to keep an eye on these things. He was doing his duty by reporting them.
It took him some time to realize that he’d lost Courtenay’s friendship. They saw each other often, at meetings and receptions. Courtenay had often dropped by his office to talk about books and news. But after this, whenever they saw each other they never seemed to be in the same part of the room. Finally, in a crush at the Hibernian Society, Dawson made his way through the crowd. By the time he reached him the mayor’s back was turned, but Dawson put his hand on Courtenay’s shoulder, and when he turned around Dawson spoke.
“My dear chap, I’ve missed you,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in weeks. When are you coming by to talk books?”
Courtenay spoke without smiling. “I’m busy just now. I don’t know when I’ll have the time.”
His face was cold and fixed. It was his look, not his words, that gave Dawson a shock, like opening the door onto a wind-blown spate of rain. For a moment Dawson stared at him, trying to make Courtenay’s gaze into the one he’d always known. But Courtenay’s face wouldn’t change.
That was the last time they’d spoken. Courtenay, his good friend of twenty years, has become his enemy. He’s a backer of the hated World. There are three of them: Courtenay, William Huger, and Francis Rodgers. They’d all been his friends once; now they’re all his enemies. Politics means shifting alliances, and Dawson’s used to riding the waves, letting the crest of someone’s rage wash under him, dissipating in the open ocean. But this rage is growing, not abating.
He’s become used to anger and threats, though they’re different here. In England people disagree, but they don’t shoot each other. Here in the South they shoot each other. Dawson rejects violence on principle. He owns a pistol but won’t carry it. He keeps it in the drawer of his night table in case of burglars. The only time he’s ever used it was to shoot his poor dog, Nellie, when she got rabies. Actually, now he can’t even find it.
On the washstand are his toilet things, cleaned and laid out by the maid: the ivory-handled straight razor, the badger-hair brush dried to a soft point, the wooden pot of shaving cream. Bay Rum with its long testimonials, the fragrant amber oval of Pears soap. The local chemist sends to London for these; they’re what his father used. It occurs to him that he may not be able to afford them now. It is an odd idea.
He doesn’t want Sarah to know how bad things are. Last fall, he had to ask for money from Rudolf Siegling, president of his board. Siegling, who’s also head of the Bank of Charleston, gave it grudgingly. That loan should have been enough to tide them over until things improved, but they’ve gotten worse. The circulation has continued to fall: in one day they lost six hundred subscribers.
His former friends are backing the World, but the most powerful opposition comes from Tillman. Up in Edgefield the planters resent having to pay wages to men whom they used to own. These men used to work their fields for nothing. It galls the farmers to pay them. Now they’ve had to watch the Negroes take over government posts, which is against the natural order of things.
Tillman resents this. And he resents Charleston, the rich Low Country, with its dark loamy soil, the long-grain rice plantations, the English aristocratic tradition. Its disproportionate political power. Tillman feels snubbed, and he resents that. The voice of the Low Country is The News and Courier, and the voice of The News and Courier is Frank Dawson. He resents Dawson.
The circulation of the World is now larger than The News and Courier’s. When he thinks of this Dawson feels a small icy charge, like a cold bullet, in his chest. Last week Dawson asked Siegling again for money; he refused. Dawson used his own shares as collateral for personal loans. At one time the paper made $30,000 a year, but now it’s losing so much money he’s had to cut it down from sixteen pages to eight, and fire some of his staff.
He has always been able to make things work. When things have been bad he has worked harder. He paid off his father’s debts, sent his sister to school, supported his brother’s charitable ventures, lent money to his brother-in-law. He had helped keep the Raines family solvent; the family who had been so generous to him during the war, and who had fallen on such hard times after it. But now, no matter what he does, things get worse. Morale is sliding: three of his staff members have left him for the World.
Dawson feels a sharp tiny clench in his gut. He moves his head back and forth to ease it, though this doesn’t help. He sets the jug in the sink and turns on the cold water for his bath. He takes off his nightshirt and waits for the jug to fill.
He’s seen his doctor about the clench in his gut. Bellinger said it might be an ulcer. Dawson had no interest in having an ulcer, and shook his head at the word.
“It’s no good shaking your head, Dawson.” Amos Bellinger has a gingery beard and dry pale hands. He is the family doctor, and a friend. “What do you mean, no?”
“I haven’t time for an ulcer,” said Dawson. “Give me something I can take drops for and which will dry up nicely and go away. I can’t take the time for this.”
“I should have asked before I made the diagnosis what you might have time for,” said Bellinger. “You don’t have to take the time to worry about the ulcer, Dawson. It will be there whether you worry about it or not. You don’t take any exercise, you know.”
“I mean to,” Dawson said, “but I haven’t time. I used to ride down to the office. I used to do those setting-up exercises.”
He’s not fat. He feels a private admiration for his solid heft, and thinks himself strong and fit. He thinks of the phrase “rude health.” His skin is pink and glowing after his cold bath. During the war they rode through the mountains in icy rain. They slept on the ground, heads pillowed on their saddles. They ate stale corn pone, bacon green with mold. The thought invigorates Dawson. He’s still that person. He could do it all again.
“Everyone used to do those exercises,” said Bellinger. “It’s the ones who still do them who get the benefit.”
Dawson smiled and shook his head. The war was something you always owned. If you fought, it was part of you, and nothing could take that from you.
Bellinger was writing something. It would be something Dawson didn’t want to read: about eating certain things, drinking certain things, not eating and drinking others. This was not the way he saw himself, as someone with an ulcer. Someone whose life was becoming circumscribed.
Bellinger wore pince-nez. When he’d finished writing he took them off and swiveled his chair around to face Dawson. He rubbed at the little oval indentations the pince-nez left in his pale skin.
“I want you to pay attention to this,” he said. “I told Martin Robertson to use this diet and he did not. You see the result.”
“I’m not going to die,” Dawson said, testy, “and I wish you’d be a bit more discreet. I don’t want to know about your patients.”
Bellinger shrugged. Robertson was dead; discretion was useless to him.
Amos Bellinger has been his family doctor for years, and except for the indiscretions he’s very good. Dawson thinks he has saved Sarah’s life, or anyway her health. At nineteen she was in a terrible carriage accident, and for a time she was paralyzed from the waist down. She has been frail ever since, and suffers from intermittent pain in her spine. Dawson depends on Bellinger to keep her healthy.
Bellinger held out the paper. “Now it’s up to you, Dawson.”
Dawson took the paper with distaste. He felt like Gulliver, surrounded by miniature adversaries, attacked by a swarm of gnats. He has also had intermittent pains in his chest, but he refused to discuss those with Bellinger. He had his life to lead.
Now Dawson sits down to put on his socks. As he sinks into his chair he hears a rich crunching sound. He stands and picks up the seat cushion. Beneath it is his hinged, three-paneled shaving mirror, folded shut. He opens it: the glass is shattered. Bright shards scatter onto the chair, the carpet. He holds it for a moment, angry but impatient. Who put it there? Some big pieces are still intact, one large enough for him to use for shaving. He won’t tell Sarah, who’ll see more bad luck. Those dreams were bad enough. He wants to move on, into his day.
You choose your own luck, you make it into what you want. Dawson has made his own way since the age of nineteen. You make your own way. Afterward it seems inevitable, as though it could only have happened in this way. But it’s you who have chosen your path, and it’s always been leading you here.
Copyright © 2019 by Roxana Robinson
