The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  She said she had to clean herself, but instead she walked out the door without her coat. In the morning, lying in bed in the crowded top floor of the 19th Street house, she thought it through with mounting nausea and found no intellectual way around the problem. Was this something that happened to other people, all the time? She didn’t think so, but how did she even start the conversation with city friends, people she saw twice a year? On the other hand, it was a simple decision: she didn’t want to marry someone who was insane, who was violent, and who would apparently never want to make love in the way she assumed people made love. She felt sympathy for his ruined mind, but it was coupled with a profound aversion, and fear.

  She wrote a letter saying that she released him from his promise and hoped that he would have a good life. They had misled each other. She slid the emerald engagement ring in the envelope and had one of the Germans from the corner hotel take it up to Victor at the Braeburn. She packed for Westfield while Carrie raged at her: Carrie thought Victor was wonderful, and wonderfully well connected. She was finally of the age when she could go to dances, and Dulcy was ruining her life. Dulcy showed her the bruises on her neck but didn’t elaborate.

  Over the course of the day, a series of pleading notes and apologies arrived by messenger, and then a clichéd screed: he would spit on her grave; he would treasure the knowledge of her regret and loneliness. You cannot live without me, he wrote.

  I can, thought Dulcy. That’s the point.

  That evening he sent Henning. This was their first real conversation: Henning said that Victor would like her to know that he would never do anything “like that ” again, that by having “accepted ” him, she had cured him.

  “Cured?”

  Henning writhed in the chair, without visible movement. She waited until he finally looked at her directly. “Do you think I should change my mind?” asked Dulcy.

  “No,” he said, reaching for his hat. He seemed relieved by the question. “He’ll only ever touch you when he’s angry or drunk.”

  She went back to the farm. Martha, not understanding Dulcy’s reasons, was smug—she hadn’t liked Victor, and Dulcy now found this reassuring rather than maddening. Carrie passed on rumors from the city, sometimes out of kindness, and sometimes out of spite: people said Dulcy was a cold fish; that she’d had affairs during her travels with her father and fretted that Victor would discover the truth; that she’d been worried about all the normal things marriage entailed (this last was especially amusing). There had to be an explanation: all that money, and good looks. They didn’t usually go together. Why ever had Dulcy let that one go?

  But as stories of Victor’s unraveling had begun to float up to Westfield—fights, some eruption at a whorehouse—any notion that she was in the wrong was lost to growing panic. Dulcy and Walton were due to leave for London and Portugal and Africa, a trip they’d planned as a last hurrah before the wedding was canceled. Now Dulcy slipped into the city a day early, and saw a doctor a friend had recommended, and understood she wasn’t free of Victor, after all. She told Walton—who’d had the sense to not tell Victor about Dulcy’s presence, or the trip—they’d have to delay, but Walton reacted to the news of her condition by telegramming a London doctor and booking them onto an even earlier ship. They were gone by nightfall.

  •••

  In Seattle, three years later, Dulcy was careful with her telegram, and Woolcock wired back immediately—

  Dulce all grand hell of a turnaround, fine deal made, hope the Lord is happy, ask the Da when he’ll voyage next? Keeping mine eyes on happy places Huns and Sows haven’t noticed yet.

  “Sows?” asked Victor.

  “The English,” said Dulcy.

  Henning looked amused, in a shuttered way. “Would he say more if you pretended to be your father?” asked Victor.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  “Mr. Woolcock wouldn’t feel the need to explain to Walton,” said Henning.

  She’d be half in love with Henning, if he didn’t terrify her. She wrote again to Robert Woolcock:

  Da ill now better soon please advise on new properties and remaining open accounts.

  In the long hours before the reply, Dulcy imagined the wizened engineer studying the slip of paper.

  Accounts here? How ill? Waht did he leave? Will advise on new prospects.

  It was her turn to stare at a piece of paper. When she took Walton his lunch that day, she tidied his room, piled books by topic and color, and rattled on about wanting to be organized so they could leave soon. Did he have keys for a bank box or hotel box in Cape Town or Johannesburg, keys for her to keep from the last trip? Any bit of information she should pass on to Robert if Walton had some sad turn of health?

  “Why would I keep a box in a tottery country like that, dear?” asked Walton. “And Robert knows to tell you everything.”

  For the next round of wires, Dulcy was given permission to be circumspect but honest about the degree of Walton’s illness and the missing funds, and Woolcock sounded authentically frayed, even in telegramese:

  I cannot believe. I will be discreet. Will he recover?

  Dulcy didn’t know. That night she once again heard Victor in the gym, drumming on the punching bag while Henning talked through the rage, soothing, singsong, matter-of-fact. When they stopped, she listened to all the usual noises—drunks, wagons, ships’ horns; Seattle was a small city, but still a city—and sorted through the receipts in the brown book, peering down through the glasses she had too much vanity to wear in public.

  She came up with nothing. Walton had docked in Cape Town on September 5 and checked in to the Mount Nelson Hotel. The next day, while Martha was beginning to die back in Westfield, he’d set up an account at Bank of Africa and given the bookbinder fifty pounds. This was mind-boggling: Dulcy wondered if the notebooks had gotten wet on the trip over, or if some blow to the head had driven Walton into this extravagance. He’d picked up the tab for a table of six that night at the Mount Nelson—Woolcock would have made the trip south from the Transvaal to meet him—and the next day he’d consulted a doctor she remembered too well, and then headed north to the mines, a two-day journey.

  There was nothing about meeting the buyers on September 12, nothing about a transfer of nine hundred thousand pounds. A good hotel in Johannesburg and another doctor there, and then a train ticket south again, and two nights back in Cape Town. And then, after all this activity, nothing but receipts for a train to Port Elizabeth and stubs from that beach town—laundry, an Indian meal, whiskey, a pharmacist’s tab for a stomach fizz, morphine, and mercury. She looked in the black book and all the others, but there was no entry for any of those days, because all the notebooks but the brown were at the binder’s. He’d rendered himself mute—how had he possibly spent his time if he wasn’t recording his time?

  A week later, he was back at the Mount Nelson. She imagined him wandering through Africa’s spring in the linen suits she’d found crumpled in his trunk, his mind filled with silk samples and women rather than mines. On September 27 he paid the Cape Town bookbinder one hundred pounds, and on September 28 he boarded his first ship home. There was nothing in the notebook to show if he’d left for even a moment when the ship docked in Australia or Hawaii.

  Ides, wind, brain rot. He hadn’t lost anything important before, not even a pair of eyeglasses, but here they were.

  Even when you are positive that a person has syphilis, it is not always best to say so... Indeed, in practising medicine, you will see and understand many sins and blemishes of which you must appear oblivious.

  —Daniel W. Cathell, 1882

  chapter 3

  The Deep Yellow Book of Cures

  •

  Walton may have told Victor that he’d been cured by a fever treatment in Italy, but he knew better, whether or not he’d speak the truth out loud. Syphilis killed everyone, fast, slow,
showily, invisibly. It had killed Dulcy’s twin brother and sister soon after birth, and it had killed her mother Philomela a few years later. The yellow book was filled with happy theories—written with a flourish, in a large hand—that Walton later covered with crabbed rage, big black hindsight X s, and brutal details: cock oozes, chancre on tongue, the lump on my ass cheek tells me their lie . He’d attempted lymph and blood inoculation, fever treatment, platinum, tellurium, vanadium, gold, every purgative in current use. He read historical accounts of the guaiacum cure and had Woolcock buy a lignum vitae plantation in Nicaragua near the harbor of Bluefields, where they’d first landed to cross the Isthmus in 1867.

  Walton had either been lucky for twenty years or his energetic search for new treatment had been at least partially successful. He had recovered from palsies, bouts of mercury poisoning (ointments were the recognized treatment, but he’d tried older methods of inhaling or injecting; mercury always worked, after a fashion, but it deafened him, damaged his kidneys, and ulcerated his mouth), and a considerable amount of what was known as “excitability.” He had yet to experience a stroke, blackened teeth, blindness, meningitis, or—until now—memory loss. Unlike William Lobb (a fellow Cornishman), Calamity Jane, Oscar Wilde, Paul Gauguin, Randolph Churchill, or the thousands of other men and women who died from syphilis each year, he was still alive.

  But the symptoms of tabes dorsalis—spinal neurosyphilis, wasting, and paralysis—had begun. Before, whenever Walton fretted about numbness while traveling, they would abandon a disappointing earthquake (or an earthquake that disappointed Walton’s theories) for a progressive clinic staffed by intelligent men. In Zurich, Berlin, Madrid, Walton was always reassured that there had been no measurable change. Dulcy would remind him that the numbness in his hand might have been caused by a binge of rant-writing to geology journals, or that the tingling in his foot had first appeared after a slide down half an Ottoman mountain, but a doctor was always more convincing with the same explanation. But now movement gave Walton away: some atrophy of the nervous system gave him a herky-jerky walk, so that he misjudged distance and slapped his feet down, and he had a strange way of moving his jaw when he was thinking.

  In Seattle, Victor, a Princeton man, sought out Ivy League talent. The doctor was elegant but spent more time talking to Victor than to Walton. After her father left the room, Dulcy, on the far side of the room—she always took the far wall with Victor—watched as the doctor laughed—ho , ho , ho—patted Victor’s arm, and brought up a promising new treatment involving cobra venom.

  Victor jerked his arm away. “My father’s tried that,” Dulcy said. “I would like a realistic appraisal of his condition.”

  The physician shrugged and looked for his hat. “He’s dying.”

  The next doctor to visit the hotel apartment was a frayed mess from Philadelphia, a Swarthmore man who insisted on talking to the patient directly, and he very tentatively suggested that Walton was doomed. He had gray sponges of hair above each ear, and nothing on top.

  “Fool,” said Walton. “Find someone who knows their business, Henning.”

  The doctor’s smelly bag made her think of an English expatriate who’d tended to Walton in Greece. That doctor had just come from the amputation of a tumorous foot, a souvenir he’d forgotten by the time he’d asked Dulcy to reach into his bag for a set of calipers. Her first feeling had been surprise, even a little wonder and humor, but the ragged filaments of tendon had done her in, and before she could budge she’d vomited into the bag.

  “Serves you right,” Walton had said to the doctor.

  Dulcy had knelt in the mess, focusing woozily on her lunch of greens and orzo, and threw up again: shreds of lamb and dark red bits of hot pepper. “Miserable girl,” the doctor had said. Walton had slapped him.

  This new doctor, who staggered whenever he turned his head and steamed with the afternoon rain, wasn’t capable of giving an insult. “Mr. Remfrey, have your hands always shaken like that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “If your daughter wouldn’t mind leaving the room, it would be helpful to examine other areas.”

  “Fuck yourself,” said Walton. “I am intact and unsored.”

  The doctor, showing a bit of spine, marched over to the open French window and latched it.

  “Well, what shall we do?” asked Dulcy.

  “Morphine,” said the doctor. “With a regular emetic.”

  “Your mother was an inbred whore,” said Walton, ratcheting himself out of bed to reopen the window. “Heal thyself, cretin.”

  Walton worried about his eye falling out, but he had no notion that his brain was losing control of his limbs. He stalked up and down the halls of Victor’s apartment like a marionette. Dulcy made his nurses take him outside, and though he moved along with some of his old pace, the foot slap continued. “But I’m dead if I don’t walk,” he said. “I need the air.”

  Victor insisted on interviewing staff personally, probably with an eye for spies, and chose a dimpled redhead for a nighttime nurse. “This won’t do, will it?” asked Henning, his eyes sad.

  “No,” said Dulcy.

  Henning hired the next applicant, a stout Bavarian with bottlebrush hair. She carried her own metallic thermometer, and Walton, without his glasses, went into a frenzy: the giant woman would put the giant needle in his cock, kill it for good.

  Not such a bad idea, dozens of women too late. He moved quickly; she rarely had a chance to warn them.

  •••

  Long, dark, still days, such large windows and so little light. Dulcy had Walton’s bed moved closer so he could watch gulls and pelicans, and once he claimed a falcon brought a fish to the sill. No one believed him. People hid in corners of the apartment. They were all very quiet—Victor had a problem with noises. He liked some voices, notably Dulcy’s and Henning’s, but as Walton’s grew weak and hoarse, it grated despite the English accent. Victor had told Dulcy that he’d never liked his mother’s voice, even when he was a baby, and maybe he hadn’t liked to be touched, even then. Some of his fitness mania had to do with his pleasure in not having clothes against his skin; on the other hand, he couldn’t bear people seeing that skin. He liked soft, light fabrics, which worked well with his Byronic profile. It was all very misleading.

  Their truce continued, careful indifference. Victor and Henning disappeared most evenings, and Henning shrugged when she asked where they went: banquets, the opera, dinners with nervous investors for new hotels. Victor inevitably sent Henning back up the elevator for things he might have forgotten, a neuroticism she’d once found charming. She learned to wait to make the run to the kitchen or to search through the papers on Victor’s desk, where she found doubt and rage, half-written letters to creditors and debtors and unions and commands to Henning:

  Tell them I’ll use them for ink if they threaten a stoppage.

  Tell Monty we ’ll find him, wherever he goes.

  And:

  Tell the doctor to give us some hope, or I’ll break the old fool’s cranium myself and dig my money out.

  Victor’s aversion to laying a hand on another human was now reassuring. She wondered how far Henning’s duties went. His only free nights came when Victor visited his new fiancée, whose existence had dripped out over the course of the week. The girl’s name was Verity; her father, predictably, owned a dozen Western newspapers. Walton, in a stage whisper: “He’s found someone perfectly unhaveable. She looks like a tall goat, a thin stoat, a human moat.”

  His language had become obsessive, unaware. If he said “putting on the dog ” in the morning, someone later would be lying doggo, being dogged, suffering through dog days, and (eventually) acting dodgy, which then led to Dickens and daggers and digging. It took a night’s sleep to break into a new letter of the alphabet. She couldn’t imagine that he’d really met the fiancée; Victor wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.


  Victor’s chef, a tiny, dun-colored man named Emil from Strasbourg, liked to put capers in every dish and sent a menu of dinner options to the captives each afternoon. Walton always requested the same few things and ate little of what arrived. After the first week, once Dulcy heard the chef’s tiny lurching footsteps move above her bedroom in his attic quarters, wine bottles clinking gently, she went to the kitchen and made Walton the things he truly liked, despite the enthusiasm for greens and lean meats he claimed when he spoke to doctors—potpies and veloutés and puddings, nothing fresher than parsley or an apple. She snuck a glass of wine from any bottle Emil hadn’t emptied.

  On a pretty night after days of rain, when Victor had stayed home with a head cold and she could hear him droning at Walton in the library, she grabbed an open bottle and climbed out the window onto the fire escape where she’d seen Emil smoke. The steps hung only a story over the hotel’s central roof, not as scary as the full drop. She pushed the bottle out, and then a glass, climbed up on a chair and crawled out, and turned to see Henning perched a few feet away, smoking a cigarette.

  “Get another glass,” he said.

  •••

  According to Walton, when Henning had left Sweden at seventeen, he’d been about to start his second year of university, with the intention of teaching literature like his parents. But his brother-in-law beat his pregnant sister, and when she miscarried and nearly bled to death, Henning set out to find him, then took the ferry from Malmö to Copenhagen before anyone fished the brother-in-law’s body out of the harbor. He sailed on to Hamburg, then to Galveston, where he sent a telegram to his cousin. He’d worked for Victor ever since, moving up from an errand boy to an emissary and negotiator, working in his spare time and investing some of his own money in the growing number of film studios in Queens.