The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  Copyright © 2017 by Jamie Harrison

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher,

  except in the case of brief quotations embodied

  in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

  incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  With the exception of the Picasso drawing reproduced in Chapter 20

  (© 2017 by the Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society [ARS],

  New York), the images reproduced in The Widow Nash are in the

  public domain, collected from the Library of Congress, the New

  York Public Library, the Wellcome Collection, the Tempest

  Anderson Photographic Archive held at York Museums Trust,

  and such sites as the excellent BibliOdyssey, the Public

  Domain Review, and Wikimedia Commons.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Harrison, Jamie, 1960– author

  Title: The widow Nash : a novel / Jamie Harrison

  Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint, 2017

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017004027 | ISBN 9781619029286 (hardcover

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary

  Classification: LCC PS3558.A6712 W53 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004027

  Jacket design by Michael Fusco

  Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates

  ISBN 978-1-61902-928-6

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  In memory of my parents, who were nothing like anyone in this novel,

  and for John Fryer, a very fine storyteller

  Cordelia Blake had spent the beginning of the end of her first life, an All Souls’ Day, wandering through the new east galleries at the Metropolitan, studying marble running girls and naked men with weapons, squinting at vases and sarcophagi and gold boxes that had once served as coffins. Upstairs, a millennia later, the girls and angry men were made of oil and watercolor, framed between the play of light on hanging game and wine glasses and lemon peels, sharp and beautiful; beyond every scene of human pursuit, and through the windows of the still lives, almost all the paintings had moving water and idealized ruins, smashed down by time or war or—possibly— earthquakes.

  Which made Miss Blake laugh.

  —Lewis Braudel, The Lady Vanishes, 1908

  Chapter 1

  Almost All Souls’ Day

  •

  People paid attention when they arrived because Carrie was beautiful and Dulcy had jilted a rich man. Dulcy hadn’t been to the city since, and once she had a glass in her hand, she found she enjoyed the spiky, expectant whispers, the open curiosity. They wore black dresses and masks, because they were in mourning for Martha, but most of the other women were pretending to be Marie Antoinette or Cinderella, and the dust from their powdered hair dropped like dandruff. Dulcy studied the men, skimming over the earnest costumes—kings and knights—for odder types like headhunters, sheiks, and Vikings, but as she often did, she found she liked the idea of people more than the reality. An insurance man at her elbow put aside his bullfighter’s cape and cap and began talking about oysters—their different shapes, their increasing rarity—and for a little while his obsession, his sliver of strangeness, was interesting. But he didn’t bear long study; he dissolved like a bad mint.

  “I met your father once, at my club,” he said. “A genius, but such a character. A little all over the place. I gather you are always in the process of traveling.”

  The insurance man came from a good family, with bundles of money, but his eyes were evasive, and she could see him work through his memory, try to suss out stories of the lost engagement. As he thought, he pursed his lips and moved them in and out.

  All around them, Carrie’s friends were playing divination games, courtship games: people were supposed to drip candle wax in finger bowls, blow out lines of candles and count the years they’d stay unwed, throw peels over a shoulder and guess what letter they formed, and bob for apples. There was no one in this room Dulcy felt like bobbing for, and probably no one who wanted to bob for her, but she allowed herself to be herded toward a dangling, tarnished hand mirror, to look behind her reflection for the man she would marry. For Carrie, who’d left a trail of peels every Halloween since she was three, the man in the mirror was peachfaced, hovering Alfred Lorrimer, who seemed to expand with wine and her attention that night, not so much opening like a flower as swelling like a sponge.

  Dulcy stood obediently in line and opened her eyes on cue: she saw her face and a black curtain, and felt a train move below them, not a sound but a shudder. “Of course it was black,” Carrie hissed in her ear, pointing to the drapery that faced the mirror. “I want you to have fun. Can’t you just do that for a bit?”

  A line of handsome, placid-faced men in silly costumes, waiting to be picked, found this amusing. “All right,” said Dulcy, finishing a second glass. “How do you say yes in Halloween?”

  “As if it were a language?” asked one man.

  “As if it were a language,” she said. The whole strange city vibrating around her, and here she was in a puddle of normal.

  “We give up,” they said.

  “Oui ,” she said. “And ja.”

  “Hohoho ,” said the bullfighter. And: “Let me fetch another glass for you.” When he headed off, as Dulcy slid toward the door, she could hear Carrie pipe away: her sister had spent years with their difficult father, months at the farm in Westfield helping their dying grandmother, but she was so happy to see people again, happy to be social. In the front hall, Dulcy put her finger to her lips when she asked a maid for her coat.

  Outside, she walked away from the line of waiting hansoms, heading south down Fifth Avenue and Broadway. The champagne had done wonderful things for her brain, now that she was alone. In Madison Square she stopped at a cart for a cheesy Greek pastry and skipped on, giddy, wiping oily fingers on a churchyard’s brick wall. Past the half-lit triangle of the Fuller Building, she turned east at the Rivoli Hotel and waved to the doorman, who was loading a collection of large people into a carriage. A moment later, she heard footsteps and turned to find the doorman hurrying up behind her. “A telephone call,” he said. “We just sent someone to the apartment to find you.”

  In the Rivoli lobby the German at the front desk pointed to the telephone, and she tried to think through her panic as she reached for the receiver. If someone was dead, a telegram arrived. Telephones meant someone was still dying—an aunt upstate in Westfield—and there was a point to haste.

  But it was Henning Falk, calling from Seattle, and Dulcy’s champagne mood evaporated while the operator finished introductions. “Walton’s dead,” she blurted out. “His ship went down. You’re calling to say he’s drowned.”

  The man at the desk flinched.

  “No, no,” said Henning. “I met your father this morning at the docks. But things are missing.”

  She hadn’t spoken to Henning in almost three years, and never
before on the telephone, but he sounded so much like himself—perhaps the voice was a little tighter, maybe there was less of a Swedish lilt at the end of each sentence—it took her a moment to find a new way to worry. “Missing. Documents?”

  “Well, yes, those too, but the money,” said Henning. “We need your help; you need to come.”

  Dulcy’s face was hot from alcohol and her bolt through the city, and she wiped a last flake of pastry crust from her coat. Jabbering people floated around the lobby, and a little man who looked like death was sneezing ten feet away, each seizure driving him deeper into the soft upholstery of an armchair. This “we” meant Victor Maslingen, her father’s business partner and her former fiancé: a royal summons. “You know that’s not possible. I’m sure Walton’s simply spent it.”

  “Nobody could spend that much. Your father is not well.”

  “Not well in what way?” There were so many possibilities.

  “He’s lost his mind,” said Henning. “What little remained. He is having problems with his memory, problems with logic. He is balmy. Barmy.”

  “Put him on the train. I can meet him halfway and take him home.”

  “No, Dulce. He’s weak and he’s feverish and he unbuttoned in the cab and fiddled himself. And it’s all of the money, entirely, every drop gone. Victor is very upset.”

  Every drop, fiddled. She felt Henning pick his way around a second language and an audience. At least six people in the hotel lobby could hear her end of the conversation; only the operator, who kept clearing his throat, could hear Henning’s. She wondered if Henning was standing in Victor’s library, if some of the static crackle was Victor, holding his breath, actually worried enough to have Henning beg her to come to Seattle.

  “I don’t want Victor near me. I don’t want to have to talk to him or see him every day.”

  “He won’t touch you,” said Henning. “He doesn’t want to see you, either. Please, Dulcy.”

  Everything pleasant was over, again. A door slammed a continent away, Victor leaving the room.

  Autumn (September 21 to December 20)

  September 27, 1290, Chihli, China, 100,000 dead.

  October 18, 1356, Basel, 1,000.

  October 20, 1687, Lima, 5,000. A wave followed.

  October 21, 1868, Hayward, California, 30.

  October 27, 1891, Nobi, Japan, 7, 273.

  October 28, 1707, Hōei, Japan, 5,000.

  November 1, 1755, Lisbon, 80,000.

  November 11, 1855, Edo, 5,000.

  November 16, 1570, Ferrara, 200.

  November 18, 1727, Tabriz, Iran, 80,000.

  November 24, 847, Damascus, 70,000.

  November 25, 1667, Shemakha, Caucasia, 80,000.

  December 16, 1811, New Madrid, Missouri. (Damage to St. Louis.)

  December 16, 1857, Naples, 11,000.

  December 16, 1902, Andijon, Uzbekistan, 4,700.

  December?, 856, Corinth, 45,000.

  —from Walton Remfrey’s red notebook

  chapter 2

  The Red Book of Disaster

  •

  Walton Joseph Remfrey, engineer, earthquake enthusiast, and sufferer of tertiary syphilis, had been born in the Cornish seaside village of Perranuthnoe in 1842. His father died when he was two, before his brother, Christopher, was even born, and when their mother, Catherine, died four years later, they were sent to the workhouse in Redruth.

  At fifteen, when Walton gained an engineering apprenticeship in a copper mine on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland, he first scribbled into a plain leather notebook:

  12 February 1858—

  The roar was like a monster’s breath, a dragon exhalation: red, yellow, then following darkness. Timbers came down like spears, through a boy’s head, a boy’s back, a rock fall landing with a sucking sound. I ran.

  The notebook was a gift from an Allihies miner’s widow, who’d plucked Walton from the novice pack and slept with him. Five boys died next to him in the mine that day, and forty-six years later, while he was sick in Seattle, he would scribble down variations of what had happened without knowing if they were memories or dreams. Dulcy wasn’t sure if it made a difference: mining deaths were repetitive, and dreams were repetitive, and what did it matter, what was true or imagined? A big dark hole in the earth, and people dropped inside and disappeared. Walton had earned his nightmares.

  Still, he’d enjoyed life:

  8 August 1867—

  I’m leaving, I said. Show me some mercy, show me your sweetness, and I’ll make it happy with mine.

  No, no, no, says Ellen.

  It’s my birthday soon, I said. I might die on that ocean and never know. Let me touch you—you have fevers, you might not last, you need to know, too. And, well, isn’t this wonderful?

  It is, she said. Most other things are worth forgetting.

  Walton had worked just as hard for his syphilis as he had for his dreams, but even before his illness, he tried to keep topics separate. Sullying the body was all good fun, but his mind deserved a system. He worked his way up and purchased two new journals, black and dull red. He scribbled an introductory limerick about a maid in his rooming house into the black one (There once was a woman from Norway , who ’d happily kneel in doorways ). By the time he was twenty-five and had saved enough to leave the Beara mines, he had separate notebooks for his travels, his scientific theories, his favorite poetry. The first brown leather notebook became a record of his financial life, while the red had the right look for disaster. He traveled with scissors and glue, pens and ink and blotting paper, trimming and pasting down newspaper accounts of tragedy, pornographic cartoons, stock prices. When he was older, he put most of these journals aside for weeks at a time—he was a busy man, not a dilettante—but the black, the red, and the brown averaged an entry a day for most of his life.

  •••

  When Walton’s last ship from Africa (Cape Town to Wellington to Honolulu to Seattle) docked on the morning of October 30, 1904, Henning Falk found him perched on a trunk on the docks, clutching his satchel of notebooks. He was singing—

  Columbo went to the queen of Spain and made a proposition,

  But what she wanted most to do was fuck in the prone position.

  The queen of Spain then said to him she’d give him ships and cargo,

  He said, “I’ll kiss your royal ass if I don’t bring back Chicago.”

  He knew the world was round-o. The queenly cunt he’d pound-o.

  That fornicating, royal-mating son-of-a-bitch, Columbo.

  Henning was no sissy, but as the lyrics rolled out, and people veered away from them, he stuffed Walton into Victor’s maroon Daimler. Walton hated automobiles, and the horror of the vehicle broke the melody in his head. He began to talk about the fact that it was almost the anniversary of the All Saints’ Day disaster in Lisbon: a great wave after the shock, thousands crushed as they prayed in swaying stone churches. “And now here we find ourselves, old friends together in another port city prone to shaking.”

  Henning asked about Walton’s other luggage, the proceeds from the sale of three mines; Walton said he thought he’d thrown the money overboard as an offering to the gods of seasickness, and that the thing to do, now that he could smell rocks and a city, was to have a razzle-dazzle, and find a woman or two.

  •••

  Back in the other world, Walton’s daughter left New York on her third train across America. Dulcy’s full name was Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey, but no one but distant relatives and teachers had ever called her Leda. Her hair was thick and brown, and her eyes were large and brown. She had a long face and nearsighted eyes, a figure that was generous without being lewd, and nervous movements. She was twenty-four years old with good posture but the shadow of a limp from breaking her leg as a young child. She seemed patient to people who didn’t
know her well, but she had a bad temper and a habit of saying cruel, articulate things she later regretted. She was flawed in other ways, but she loved her sister and friends and aunts and even her older brothers, though at a distance. Her mother, Philomela, had died when she was ten, and she’d spent much of her life since then traveling with her father. She’d only missed this last trip to Africa to spend the summer in Westfield, New York, watching her grandmother Martha die. She loved her father, and she was happy enough to see him again alive, but she did not want to see her former fiancé, Victor.

  When Dulcy, still trimmed in black, reached Seattle on November 5, 1904, Henning Falk met her, too. It was raining, and he was wet despite an umbrella, the city and harbor and man all shining like metal. Henning never looked quite human, anyway: when he smiled he was golden and angelic, but at rest he was so sharp-angled and preoccupied—long, slanted gray-blue eyes, high cheekbones, and hooked nose—that people moved out of his way on the crowded sidewalk here, just as they had in New York.

  With Dulcy, he was usually lighthearted, almost silly; he was only a year older. He hummed, used the wrong slang, talked about a play he’d just seen, offered her a cigarette. Victor would never notice, he said; Victor had stuffed the apartment with spruce boughs to ward off the smell of Walton’s many medicines. But though Henning didn’t explain the crux of the issue as blatantly as he’d described what Walton had been doing in the auto, by the time she arrived at Victor’s apartment in the Butler Hotel, she understood that at least one million dollars—the entirety of the profit from the African mines Walton had just sold on Victor’s behalf—really was missing. Walton had arrived with a letter from the mines’ new owners, hoping they would do business again, but there’d been no other hint of the profit, gold or cash or bankers’ notes or documents.

  This explained why Victor, who hadn’t spoken to Dulcy in three years, was willing to see her: he was virtually ruined. “Drained dry, tapped out,” said Henning. “Mightily buggered. He paces and he boxes and he watches your father, waiting for him to remember.”