The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn,

  I earth in earth forget these empty courts,

  And thee returning on silver wheels.

  To Henning:

  I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

  To Dulcy:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea change

  Into something rich and strange.

  A little bit of everything: Merry Christmas. Fifty years with a fountain pen, reams of blotting paper, but he might have liked his handwriting better than the poetry. Walton had always been self-referential, but this was sharper stuff than he usually enjoyed, and none of it came from the rose-pink journal or the stacks of Bullfinch and the Brothers Grimm on the bedside table. How could he still remember Shakespeare and not a fortune?

  They were all in the sitting room again, trapped together with their cards, while Walton, having spread this wisdom, flipped the pages of an illustrated copy of Aesop. Dulcy jumped when Victor whispered, just a foot away, “Why is he reading books of fables?”

  Except for Victor, who had turned to brandy, they were all reading fables. “Because he thinks his dreams are turning into fables.”

  “Maleficent, malaprop, melon, mellow, melodious,” said Walton.

  “What does that mean?” asked Victor. When he spent more than a few seconds listening to Walton now, his face beaded with sweat.

  “Paddle, saddle, straddle, fiddle-faddle.”

  Victor gripped his head. Dulcy headed for her room and woke an hour later to the sound of Victor and Walton howling at each other, Walton having evidently crept into the library for another volume. When the voices stopped, she stayed where she was, weighed down by wine and the notion that she could sleep through a murder, and woke again to someone lying down on the bed: Victor, on top of the covers, stiff and staring at the ceiling. He’d come through Walton’s bedroom.

  “Let me stay, just like this. Let me stay. I won’t touch you. Don’t laugh that I even say that.”

  Let me let me let me; the idea that she’d laugh about any of it. They lay without moving for an hour before he left, and in the morning she found Henning in the kitchen. He had new locks placed on both doors. Victor spent the day in his room, claiming a headache.

  A few nights later, Victor went to dinner and the opera with Verity and friends. He drank too much, and Verity chided him in front of the others. Victor said nothing but drained another bottle. When she commented, he broke his glass against the edge of the table; when one of their dinner partners remonstrated him, he beat the man bloody, and when others stepped in, he left Henning to deal with the mess.

  It was the end of the engagement. Victor began to jump rope instead of box, and he talked about going to plays, going to movies, going to concerts. At meals, he droned on about mineral prices and lumber prices, things that he only half understood. He’d had a better grip on newspapers, his main topic in the past, but now he would talk without pausing about everything that came through his mind—about his day, his past. He had no sense of sarcasm, or much humor at all. It made for dense, maddening conversations, heavy like bad bread, cream soup without salt. Carrie was willing to listen to him—they gossiped about New Yorkers—and Dulcy escaped to Walton, who wanted to hear Melville, The Tempest, and The Golden Bough, with little blasts of silliness from Edgar Nash and Wilde. She guessed his vision was failing.

  One night they all (not Walton, left with a nominally female nurse) went to dinner and a play, and seeing people who might be sane, all out enjoying their lives, pushed Dulcy into a thrum of longing. She felt as if she were in the middle of a dream where she couldn’t run. All these lives; all these men who weren’t Victor. A tall man leaning against a doorway, a man with a red angry beard and dark blue eyes who stroked a woman’s arm. Anyone, almost: the world was hysterical with possibility, women she might have been, men she might love. Tall, short, smiling, strange—she studied them with a sliver of revulsion, a shiver of pleasure.

  In the car after dinner, Victor touched her elbow, a pinch on the bone. “I am comfortable with you again,” he said.

  Bully for you, thought Dulcy, pushing against the door. But the giddiness lasted: back at the Butler he brought out brandy and bowed when he handed Walton a glass. “To your health,” he toasted, and he refilled their glasses.

  “To business,” said Walton, all sunshiny. “And travel. When will we leave to meet Christopher?”

  Victor turned slowly to Dulcy. “Leaving?”

  “His brother will be in New York in the spring.”

  “No.”

  “The spring. Months away.”

  He threw his brandy glass past her head. Dulcy turned to see it hit the wall, then made herself stare at his blank, flushed face while she finished her own glass. Walton looked more like a bird than ever, swiveling his neck to take in the room.

  “That won’t do,” said Henning.

  “She knew that would upset me,” said Victor. “She said it deliberately.”

  “She said it because she’d like to believe the world will go back to normal.”

  Victor left the room, and Carrie laughed. “Love blooms eternal.”

  But Henning, stitches still in his forehead from mopping up the end of one more Victor engagement, was less sanguine. Out on the fire escape, bundled up with the remnants of the brandy and cigarettes, he told her she should take Walton east. Victor might protest, but if she asked when he was sober, he would be forced to allow it. “You need to be away from here,” he said. “You see how he looks at you again.”

  That night she heard a key in Walton’s door, and she could feel Victor’s confusion. A moment later, the same sound in the hall, and then one great blow against the door before he walked away.

  •••

  At New Year’s dinner, Walton toasted Victor and Dulcy as if they were engaged—to your love, to your multiplication, you can pick up the mine proceeds when you reach Manhattan for your honeymoon—then turned to Carrie and proclaimed, “I know they are still in league against me. I know they meet at night and suck and fuck and plot. She forgets that he’s a murderer.”

  Carrie blinked virginal eyes. Victor headed off to smash things in his office. Dulcy finished her wine and watched Henning tap Walton’s hand. “Don’t be such an ass, old man. We want to be able to miss you when you finally die.”

  On Twelfth Night, Dulcy baked a king cake, and Walton, who got the slice with the bean, was the Lord of Misrule. Carrie, aptly, found the pea. Walton seemed to enjoy himself, then became enraged: this bean and pea thing was English, he said. Dulcy should have included a thimble and a ring and a sixpence. She wanted to forget that she was Cornish.

  He made less and less sense. His right eye began to cloud, and his left hand turned into a claw. One ear suppurated, and a front tooth was going gray. His muscles twitched, and his voice was hoarse from a mercury overdose. He moaned, babbled, lectured Dulcy on the hotel they should use in Constantinople. He knocked over inkwells and refused to try modern pens. He went back to dabbing ink in patterns on his skin, stars circling imagined sores; never a good sign. “They’re trying to find their way out,” he said. “Perhaps if I dig a bit.” He discussed Carrie’s rushed wedding logically and fired off sane instructions to the Boys about some property in Michigan. But on the topic of what had happened to the proceeds of the Berthe or Black Dog or Swanneck mines, he made no sense: he had or hadn’t sold them, they had or hadn’t existed. There had been a fire, a collapse; Victor had owned diamond mines, not gold mines, and diamond mines were difficult to sell. He’d deposited the money in Durban; he’d hidden it in his pants. Had they checked his pockets?

  Whatever end-stage syphilitic unraveling was hap
pening in his brain and spine, the changes came faster. He’d had X-rays the previous spring—crackling green light, what smelled like cooked meat—which had miraculously shown pristine bones, but she knew he had passed a point. He cried out, his fingernails digging into the bedding or their arms, and even Carrie took to reading to him in between bouts of morning sickness. No one could take pain forever, and he wanted more and more morphine, too much morphine, but who was anyone to judge. Dulcy hoped it would end with a vessel in his brain, a kink and an explosion rather than slow rot or a tumor or an utter loss of mind. She didn’t want him to worry, and he didn’t: on any given day, Walton might be found looking for his clothes, “looking for a ramble.”

  “You’re very weak.”

  “I’m not a zoo animal.”

  A circus animal, then. He was in the sense that he was putting on a show, but she didn’t say this, and she didn’t remind him that he was dying. Walton had made it clear he didn’t want to know the truth, and she went along. She didn’t tell him to do anything anymore—take walks, eat apples, take medicines other than morphine, stop trying to touch his nurses. She was a bad daughter, but the definition of good was faulty.

  Walton noticed, and it seemed to worry him. “You haven’t been carping at me lately.”

  “You haven’t done anything carpable.”

  “I’d as soon embrace my weak points. To what end would I change?”

  Well, this one, thought Dulcy. His thoughts, these days, only enlarged for his own soul, and sometimes he claimed he wasn’t ill at all—it was all a mistake, a momentary lull. He said he was embarking on his third life, another wife, no strife. Back to the idea of Mexico; perhaps he’d seek out a fine woman he’d once known in Christopher’s town.

  •••

  But then: He called out in the night, and after a bolt of fear that Victor was involved, she hurried to unlock the door. Walton was hysterical, wild, curled up like a little boy; he’d had a dream, and all he could say for a bit was no no no. He said he was hot, and she put a wet cloth on his head, but his skin was icy. Dulcy brought tea, and then whiskey, and an hour later Walton managed to tell his dream:

  His mother had sent a light to find him underground, where he slept; he had followed a glass candle upward for miles. She wanted him to find a lost horse, and he’d started out, but he was so tired, his feet so sore, that he’d decided to fly. He’d circled over the peninsula—he remembered seeing Penzance, and he remembered swooping closer to see glittery-eyed dolphins in the water. But no horse, and the rain began to fall, and it made his plumage wet—he was really a bird by now, again, as in the dream when Dulcy had first arrived—and he began to plummet toward the waves, diving like a seabird with his mouth open, feeling himself dying as he plunged past seahorses and sharks and octopi, swallowing the world—the unwarped primal world—toward a mountain which split his breast.

  “And you woke up?”

  “And I died,” he said. “And that wasn’t so hard, but then I understood I wouldn’t see my mother again. It was as if it was sixty years ago.”

  Tears ran down his face again, and she dabbed with a handkerchief. “Tell me what’s happening to my eye,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

  He watched her intently, and she didn’t react. “I think it could be some sort of rash, perhaps from all this seafood. Perhaps just a sty.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” she said. “But I think that’s the likeliest thing.” Her hands were shaking: his eyelid was about to open up.

  “Bring me a mirror?”

  “No,” said Dulcy.

  “Well,” he said. “Vanitas. Everything means something, dear.”

  •••

  Dr. Dagglesby’s wiry assistant showed up panting with a prescription and a note the next morning, delaying an appointment—the doctor was busy saving a life, a worthy life. The nurse had sent word that she was sick. It was that kind of day.

  “Worthy,” said Victor, flushing.

  “No one wanted to see the man, anyway,” said Dulcy.

  She wasn’t sure if Walton had slept. When he was wheeled into the dining room for breakfast—Henning had found a wheelchair for Walton that had a large tray, and he managed to balance his eggs and two notebooks (black and turquoise) without spilling—he told them it was the 212th anniversary of the destruction of Catania, sixty thousand dead so long ago; he’d been hearing old voices every time he shut his eyes. Old was the sound of the day, as in sold, mold, told, and gold, which was why Victor delayed a meeting at the newspaper. But Walton worked his way to rolled, and cajoled, and retold, and then told Henning stories about the notable card games of his life, so many of which had happened during earthquakes.

  “You played always,” said Henning. “Are you trying to say earthquakes happened because of the game?”

  Victor, transparently hungover, was sipping tomato juice.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” said Walton, smiling.

  “You lost my money for a reason?” asked Victor.

  “Your money is safe.”

  Victor drained his glass and stood and walked over to Walton’s wheelchair. Dulcy started to rise and Henning was halfway there when Victor bent with his face a few inches from Walton’s and screamed, “Where is the fucking money , old man ?”

  Henning moved past him, twirled Walton’s wheelchair, and pushed him out of the room. “I will kill you if you touch him,” said Dulcy.

  “I might welcome that,” said Victor.

  She ran down the hall after Henning, and they helped Walton into the bathroom, and then into bed. Henning said he’d get Victor to the newspaper; the meeting would be long and would give him time to calm down.

  “Such an unhappy human,” said Walton. “Henning, you must never forget that you are the better man.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Henning, at the door. He pointed to the lock, and Dulcy nodded.

  “I am.”

  Walton slept, and Dulcy waited for the sound of the elevator. When it came she went to the window and watched until she saw the cousins emerge and climb into the maroon Daimler. Walton’s voice startled her.

  “It’s no good. I can’t remember, but he won’t give up until it’s over.”

  “We’ll just have to find it then.” She straightened his stack of notebooks, bird books, mythology. The garnet journal was on top, and she opened it to read a calm but lunatic entry about transformation and memory, germs and gems and genies and gender and gentleness. “Sooner or later, they’ll find the bank you used. Your writing is steadier.”

  “So it goes,” he said. “I’d like us to be on a train next week. You must get some things for me while they’re away.”

  “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “I’ll call Carrie if I need anything. You must go to the library to find books of sea mammals and fish. I would like to identify the things I saw in my dream. And I would like another bottle of morphine.”

  “Didn’t someone go to the druggist yesterday?”

  “Bottlebrush spilled it all. I need more. My head is full of forks. You think I’m at peace when I sleep, but I’m not.”

  “Is this a new pain?” His skin was gray, and it caved in around his mouth and the bridge of his nose. She touched his hand and it was cold; she touched his icy foot and he didn’t even notice and wave her away.

  “When my eyes are shut, I’m in a bad place, Dulce. I’m underground, and I need to be out in the air. Buy some train tickets, San Francisco or Santa Barbara. Get us some champagne, too. I haven’t had champagne for the longest time.”

  “All right. Don’t think about the underground.”

  He wanted to sit by the window; Dulcy got Carrie, grumbling, to help get him into the rolling chair. Walton was still teasing his younger daughter about learning to be motherly as Dulcy pulled on a coat and
a knit cap and stuffed banknotes into her pocket. She kissed his forehead and started for the door. “Dulce.”

  “What?”

  “When this is over, you must leave this place, and you must never see this man again.”

  Carrie rolled her eyes. Dulcy took the stairs—she’d push herself into a mood that matched the weather instead of life. As she walked up Second Avenue in the cold, fresh air toward the pharmacy, she thought of ways that they could leave despite Walton’s condition, places to go in California or the Southwest. Henning would help now; they all understood there was no choice.

  The druggist handed over the morphine with an intense look, eyebrows arching left to right and back again. “The lady with the wiry hair fetched two for him yesterday,” he said. “Keep an eye on the breathing.”

  “He says she spilled it,” said Dulcy.

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m surprised he can even talk.”

  Every other errand was about ginning up some happiness: the florist’s for something bright, the library so that Walton could identify his dream animals, the markets for veal and shellfish, cheese and vegetables for the next few meals, all to be charged to Victor and delivered. She needed three or four days to make Walton strong enough for a train; she needed to talk to the doctor about ways to keep him alive long enough to die in a better place.

  And then, some disquiet, thinking of the doctor, thinking of medicine: she’d never seen Walton take more than a spoon of morphine at a time, and Bottlebrush wasn’t the spilling type, or an addict. Maybe she sold it to someone, or maybe Walton wanted to give it to someone, or maybe he’d just wanted her out of the apartment.

  She thought all this while standing in the wine and tobacco store, looking for the right bottle of champagne. He never drank champagne. She’d stopped listening to the clerk, who made a clucky sound of annoyance as she turned for the door.

  Dulcy reached the sidewalk, skin crawling, and broke into a trot. She was only a block away when she looked up and saw Walton in the open window. She began to run, morphine bottle bobbing in her coat pocket, and saw him step forward and fall, a small and strange and fragile figure. He dropped slowly, nightshirt twisting, arms and legs outstretched. In the very long moment while he was still in the air, sprinting the way she had when she was a little girl, she must have believed she could catch him.