Almost Famous Women (21 page)

I put more coins on the table and walked her back to her flat.

“I heard on the wireless that you have a one in ten thousand chance of dying each night in a raid,” I said, thinking those chances sounded pretty favorable.

“My chances are much better,” Dolly said, squeezing my hand.

In reality she was probably more likely to die of an overdose than in a raid. The paraldehyde vials were everywhere in her room, giving it a distinct vinegary smell.

I knew Dolly wanted desperately to believe in her own glamour and bravery—twenty years ago she
had
been brave, a volunteer ambulance driver on the front lines of the First War, dodging bombs and changing her own tires under the spray of bullets—but we both knew that instead of making love to androgynous heiresses and sticking it to the Germans, she was now lying comatose in her bed, racked by hallucinations.

When we were younger I'd envied Dolly's worldliness and experience to the point of pain; it made me feel weak, pampered, and inadequate. While my brother and Dolly were off fighting, I went with my mother to the cathedral to assemble care packages of Bovril and cigarettes for soldiers. I slept in a soft bed my entire life. I've never seen a dead body, let alone thousands.

“Would you stay with me?” Dolly asked. “We can read the paper and I can make you some tea.”

“I guess I could stay for a little while,” I said. “But I can't miss my train.”

“I'll braid your hair,” she said, pulling me closer. “The way I used to.”

I'd never had any boyfriends to speak of. I liked to be touched and she knew it.

“How's your mum?” she asked.

“The nights are hard for her,” I said. “Even out in the country. We can still hear the planes.”

“I cry myself to sleep every night,” Dolly said, staring at the street. “The sounds, the vibrations. It's too much.”

Yes, Dolly had once been a hero.

Now she was just a coward and we both knew it.

How had Dolly first come to our house? I can't remember, but it must have been because of my mother, who was a collector of Oscar's manuscripts and clothes. She owned two of his dress shirts, a handful of personal letters, early notes for
Dorian Gray,
and pamphlets from his lecture series, and kept them in a trunk in her room. Over time I've come to believe my obsession with Dolly was first hers. My mother, a bored and wealthy housewife, heard of Oscar's brother's poverty and helped pay the bills for Dolly's birth in a pauper's ward. Over the years she bought artifact after artifact and kept Dolly's mother afloat.

Mum's money hadn't kept Dolly out of a convent, where she'd been tossed for a while as a child, but she came back to us as an adolescent with some obligation toward my mother that she wanted to honor. She joined us for dinner weekly, and we all fell in love with her in our different ways. My mother loved her resemblance to Oscar. I loved the way she recited Byron, and the way she made
me feel. She disarmed my shyness in a way no one else ever had, coaxed words and laughter out of me, forced me into stating my opinions—
but how do you really feel about long underwear?
—snuck D. H. Lawrence books into my room and left them underneath my silk pillowcase. She knew my insecurities and had once, well into a bottle of wine, recited them: “men, your hawk-like nose, your lack of success as a painter, your knobby knees, and your boring existence supported by your family and not yourself.”

Dolly was the exclamation point in my life. She made me feel things: adoration, anger, frustration. She was always in love and it made her glow.

But she didn't glow anymore.

The following day I was sitting on the edge of her bed as she slept. We were supposed to go out for tea and then volunteer at the cathedral making care packages for soldiers, but she was in no shape to leave her flat. I knew tears would stream down her face in the afternoon sun; her pale eyes were sensitive to light. Her sheets were damp; she suffered from night sweats. I let her sleep.

I saw a small packet of letters tied with blue silk ribbon on her bedside table, right next to two vials of what must have been paraldehyde. The letters' edges were tattered. Curiosity seized me. I knew deep down I shouldn't read them, that even the most boisterous, immodest people have secrets and a need for privacy, but I wanted to believe—I have
always
wanted to believe—that I'm Dolly's sister, or something more, maybe an extension of her, and therefore it would be okay if I merely peeked at a letter or two.

For years people who admired Dolly's wit and entertaining personal letters pleaded with her to write a book, but she never
had. She was lazy, but I think she was also stymied by her uncle's shadow.

“How can I be any good if he has used it all up?” she once said to me.

When I opened the first letter I found pages of her looping script; I knew it like my own. I was surprised to see it was a letter to a girl named Betty Carstairs, a girl she called Joe. I felt a pang of jealousy, just as I had when Dolly came home and talked ceaselessly about how fast Joe could change a tire, how she cut her hair like a man—the type of women Dolly loved were women I could never be.

It's not a dream if it really happened, it's a memory that comes to me in my sleep, isn't it? Do you have these same nightmares?

I'm driving my ambulance over the war-scorched earth, toward the front lines in Verdun. It's March 1916, and you would have been out doing the same. The ground is black, and covered in piles of receding snow. Naked trees jut from the earth. The Meuse River is an ice slick, its banks covered in unexploded shells, split limbs. I pass the white-rubble ruins of all those nameless villages, approaching Fort Souville from the south. Where farms, churches, and green fields once stood lie piles of German stick grenades, bomb scars, and dead bodies. My wheels shake and skid over potholes. I grip the steering wheel so hard my frozen knuckles bleed.

In this dream, and maybe you have some like it, I haven't slept for thirty-two hours. I can't feel my fingers, nose, or ears. I've long since forgotten to be hungry.

As I get closer to Fort Souville, I can see smoke—or is it fog?—rising from the gouged hills. My windshield is cracked and my jacket is ripped. Everything in me wants to turn around, but I can't. It's my duty to continue; this is why I ran away from home; this is the adventure I
wanted. I thought I wanted. Dolly Wilde, ambulance driver. Dolly Wilde, patriot. Dolly Wilde, adventuress. And we did have adventures, didn't we? Valid adventures. But we paid for them, you and I.

In the dream I can never turn back, and I wake up sick with dread, because I don't know if I could still do the things that we did then, see the things that we saw. We were just children, weren't we? Young girls who were going to do their part?

I thought that life as an ambulance driver—wrapping broken limbs, plucking lice from my hair, kicking ice from the wheels—was the antithesis of pleasure seeking, the only way I could avoid repeating my uncle's flawed existence. Everyone told me I had his face. Even you said, “It is Oscar incarnate, only much prettier . . .”

What we saw changed me. Those days are why I don't cry at weddings, why I drink, why I say something rash at dinner. They are why I forget to pay my bills. They are why I can't sleep. They are what I
see
in my sleep. They are why I don't waste time doing practical things, hoping the world will be good to me when I'm older. Tell me, Joe, do you think the world is still good to women like us? To anyone?

How are your boats? I miss driving. If only I had a car of my own.

You said in your last letter that I taught you flexible thinking, but I don't think anyone can teach you much. As for my writing, I have nothing to show. The world prefers listening to me, looking. That's what I was made for I suppose.

When Dolly began to stir I slowly tucked the stack of letters into my leather bag. She would miss it, of course, but given how much of her life she spent blacked out, she'd assume it was misplaced, knocked behind the bureau.

“How long have you been here?” she asked, licking her lips, stretching her arms. She looked old.

“Only a minute. I'll let you rest,” I said. I kissed her cheek and let myself out of the flat. I walked to the train, aware that the light was fading and night was coming on soon. The city seemed heavy, mid-sigh, as if bracing itself for a blow, and I guess it was.

On the train back home to my mother's empty mansion in the countryside—I never thought of it as mine, I had nothing—I dozed off, then woke up in a semilucid state. I closed my eyes again and saw Dolly in her prime.

She was descending a staircase slowly, dressed as her uncle Oscar in a borrowed fur coat. A hush came over the crowded foyer—how many women can silence a crowd? Dolly could.

The cane Dolly carried clicked on every stair. She thrust her chin into the air and then looked down, making eye contact with the people beneath her. She remained in character, though it wasn't much of a stretch; Dolly was gregarious at parties and depressed the morning after. But she had dressed to awe us and she did; she made the papers the next day:
Niece Dolly Brings Oscar Back to Life.

And though I was fascinated by her, I hated seeing her like this, drinking up her own social success. Her laugh reached across the room and strangled me. No, I preferred private Dolly. I liked Dolly in my library with a book on her lap, not perched on the arm of a plush sofa with champagne in hand, someone, anyone, kissing her neck.

I left the party early that night.

I always left parties early.

A week later I went to meet Dolly at Russo's and was disappointed to see her friend Jeanette there. She and Dolly were overdressed
for the venue, but they both had more panache than money, a quality in a woman that bothered my mother, and I guess it bothered me too.

Jeanette wore a fox stole and tapped her nails on her water glass as I approached. She shifted in her chair. She was bird-thin and just past pretty, her blond hair going gray, her gray eyes blinking repeatedly. She lit a cigarette, looking at her fingers as if she was impatient with their inability to move faster with the match. She brought the small fire to her face.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Let's get another chair,” Dolly said apologetically, waving to the waiter, her waiter.

“Welcome,” Jeanette said, exhaling. Her voice was pitchy and plaintive.

She and Dolly had been friends for years now. They'd met over an opium pipe at Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

“I love meeting people that way,” Dolly had once confided in me. “Colliding into them. There's a strange intimacy that comes with intoxicated conversations. You discard barriers. You're interesting and filled with a peculiar energy, and you just want to share it.”

“I wouldn't know,” I'd said.

Dolly had nodded and patted my thigh in a way that was both insulting and compassionate.

The waiter brought the third chair and we sipped water in silence. Jeanette muttered something awful about “death and destruction becoming monotonous,” and Dolly rose from the table.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I'm going to the ladies' room.”

“Here,” Jeanette said, fishing around inside her worn leather handbag to produce a monogrammed silver compact. “Take this.”

I knew it was packed with cocaine. I also knew Jeanette thought I was naïve. These situations were common in Dolly's company and used to make me feel insecure. Now I just felt infuriated, fatigued.

Dolly placed the compact into her own bag and walked through the restaurant with feigned elegance. Whenever I watched her walk in public I remembered a line someone had written anonymously about her during a Victorian parlor game called Honesty:
Dolly doesn't walk, she lumbers
.