Doc - Mary Doria Russell [91]
He’d have begun with the Fantasie Impromptu to show off for the children and because he’d been thinking of Chopin since Father von Angensperg’s visit. Next, for the grown-ups, a shift in mood and tempo: the B-flat Minor Nocturne, with its slow, watery, tidal movement, like dawn on the Georgia coast. To keep the boys interested, he’d follow with the Polonaise in F-sharp Minor, which began with a bang but floated toward a lovely quiet conclusion that always seemed to lead him—lost by then, no longer aware of anything but the music—into the Waltz in A Minor, graceful and willowy and almost unbearably sad …
Moved and amazed, Belle and her mother would have exchanged glances, each slightly shaken by how sure she was. For the first time in months and months, they’d have been united in a shared conviction. Yes. Yes, this is the one. This soft-spoken, refined gentleman, with his shy, crooked smile and sly, dry humor, who was so good with children.
In her bed that night, Belle—already girlishly in love—would have remembered every word Dr. Holliday had said and imagined all that remained unspoken. Over the next few weeks, she’d become increasingly aware of how much he yearned for a home, a family, quiet companionship, and gentle affection. That deepening understanding would have placed the two of them on a more equal footing, despite the differences in their backgrounds and their ages.
When they were alone after Doc paid a call, Bob and Alice Wright would’ve talked about the younger couple. In doing so, they’d have rediscovered a little of the intimacy that had been missing for so long, for no matter what their adolescent daughter thought, there was indeed a time when they were in love, and each silently regretted the accumulation of resentment and grievance that had come between them. Bob’s visits to Bessie Earp’s establishment would have become less frequent. Dinner invitations to Captain Grier might well have ceased.
When the time came, Bob and Alice would have given their blessing to Belle and her young man wholeheartedly. The wedding would certainly have been the most splendid in Dodge City’s short history, with local guests from both sides of Front Street and a few Kansas congressmen in attendance as well, along with relatives from Missouri and Georgia.
A year or so later, at the advanced age of seventeen, Belle would have made Bob and Alice grandparents at long last. But while there is every reason to imagine that Dr. and Mrs. John Holliday would have enjoyed a few genuinely good years together, their happiness could not have lasted long, for Belle had lived all her short days amid soldiers, buffalo hunters, railroad laborers, drovers, hookers, and drunks, among whom consumption was as ordinary as venereal disease and as untreatable as measles, whooping cough, and typhoid. Her enviable alabaster skin and delicate, slender beauty at fifteen were in fact the earliest signs of the tuberculosis that would carry her off at twenty-one. Had she and John Henry married, Dodge Citians would have shaken their heads and spoken sadly about the double tragedy when—two years after Belle’s passing—Doc Holliday was laid to rest beside his wife in Prairie Grove Cemetery, not far from Johnnie Sanders’ grave.
The couple’s small orphaned children would remember their handsome young parents only vaguely. A generation later, John Henry Holliday and Isabelle Wright Holliday would exist only as entries in an obscure genealogy: an unremarkable Kansas dentist and the wife who had—like many women of their time—preceded her husband in death.
So. There you are. Nothing could have changed the commonplace calamity that would end those two lives—together or apart—no matter what they did or didn’t do in 1878. The Fates