The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  She reached him a moment after he hit the ground, before anyone else came close, and she crouched next to him on the sidewalk. His lips opened and his eyes shifted from cloud to cloud, moving to keep the light while people craned in to watch him die. Blood spread under his head, and a butcher-shop smell floated through the air. She didn’t believe that what he felt was pain, but Walton couldn’t speak, for the first time in her memory, and as people surrounded them and jabbered and blocked his view, she leaned down and whispered things in his bleeding ear: that she loved him, that all pain would be over, that he’d been a great man, a poet, a scientist, a wonder. She pulled his shirt down to his legs and tried to shield his face from the crowd’s view with her body, but people kept bending low, shadows around her head while she watched Walton’s skin stop moving. When she turned, there was a shape just above them, blocking the dim sun: a dark-haired man was holding his bowler hat out to give them privacy from the crowd, his back to them as he thrashed the onlookers: What in the fuck are you looking at here? Go to the roof, if you’d like a view. Piss off and let her love.

  •••

  She persuaded the police to bring him to the apartment instead of to the morgue: poor confused old man, look at the open window, he’d been Mr. Maslingen’s guest. Someone had gone to find Mr. Maslingen now; someone else had told Carrie, because Dulcy heard screams from above, and she left Walton while the police waited for the stretcher.

  Upstairs, Dulcy wrapped Carrie into bed and headed for Walton’s room. The bedclothes were tossed to one side, and the tall French windows were still open; two drained morphine bottles lay on the carpet. She did not look out and down. He’d always left a note before, when he’d run away in any sense, and she found it in a scrawl on blotting paper under his specimens, the gold, copper, and silver lumps: That’s that. I can’t bear the wait. My love to all.

  She scooped up his notebooks and papers, carried them to her room, and came back for his briefcase. She felt through the drawers and his shoes, checked under the pillow and the bed. She couldn’t find the plain leather book of accounts, and she tried not to imagine it flying away while Walton smashed into the street. Her windows were open, too, and between the racket of passing trolleys Victor’s frantic foghorn voice floated upward and began to dig away at her brain.

  Dulcy lay facedown on her own bed. She should go back down and sit with Walton—she’d left him alone for so much of the time in Seattle, and now she was doing it again. She was horrible, and she wept, tears pooling on the pillow. When she floundered for a handkerchief on her bedside table, it took her a moment to focus on Walton’s eyeglasses, folded on top of the brown money book, curved from being worn against his bony chest.

  •••

  The police lowered Walton onto his bed, and Victor wept with his hands over his face until a maid arrived with a bowl of warm water and soap and Henning pulled him down the hall. Carrie helped at first, then sat stunned and sick while Dulcy stripped away what was left of the nightshirt and the strange bandages, draping a towel over each section of skin while she dabbed away at blood and the magic pen markings. Though his face was unbroken, the rest of his body felt like it was stuffed with loose gravel. Dulcy stopped trying to clean the body when she realized that his ribs had forced their way through the skin of his back.

  Two hours later, she took the side stairs all the way down to the service entrance. She slid past the stain and hooked north until she reached the Gold Building, and she looked for Schaub on the elevator list. This Schaub was a cousin of Walton’s New York banker, and when she sat down across from him, she showed him the next-to-the-last note in the leather book:

  D—close the special accounts with Schaub. He may take revenge. Do as the notebookssay.

  Walton had listed accounts at four banks in Seattle. “What do the notebooks say?” asked this thinner, less trustworthy Mr. Schaub, reaching out to pat her gloved hand.

  Dulcy shook her head. “Nothing that makes sense.” She kept her eyes on the hunting-scene wallpaper, the gray marble floor, the tall buildings across Second Avenue (no one else falling, currently—how often did someone jump?), and only gradually became aware of the man’s confusion.

  “I don’t, though, understand. I’m not sure what Mr. Remfrey had in mind here, asking you to protect these accounts. Mr. Maslingen doesn’t have any access to these funds.”

  She had not mentioned Victor. “I don’t know that my father really had Mr. Maslingen in mind,” said Dulcy. “I’m only doing as he asked.”

  “Well, there are four separate joint accounts in each of his children’s names.” He pushed a sheet of paper toward her. Not more than five thousand in each, and all of it deposited around 1900; this wasn’t what they all had been looking for. Dulcy gave him New York addresses for Carrie and Winston and Walter, but she asked for hers in cash. While Mr. Schaub shuffled papers, she stared down at the little bit of blood visible on her wrist, above the glove, and she thought about the other banks in other cities. He may take revenge —she wondered if Victor was anything but a victim, but she veered away from doubt. She wanted to believe Walton on this particular day.

  She took the trolley to the next bank, the Metropolitan on Seneca ($2, 100 per child), walked on to Washington Trust on Pine ($ 845) and First Columbia on James ($1, 319). At each, she had her brothers’ and sister’s money mailed, and she took her own in cash. Rain began, a sprinkle and then a deluge, soaking through her coat and overwhelming her boots. She tried not to focus on faces, because all the people around her looked stretched and strange, but she started to melt on Western Avenue, and she ducked into an alley near a hop basement. Twenty feet away some drunks watched her from under an awning. She pushed Walton’s notebook against her face to block their view and wondered belatedly if the ink had transferred, if it looked like calligraphy on her cheek and lips.

  She was still two blocks from the Butler when Henning ran toward her and circled, a large, frantic herding dog. He’d lost every shred of his Viking aplomb. “Why are you out here?” he said. “Why would you be walking around this city at such a time? We thought you’d thrown yourself in the ocean.”

  The notebook was tucked inside her coat; the new money was in her bag. Henning wrapped an arm around her. She burst into tears and truly couldn’t stop.

  •••

  Grief: it was really just a swim in and out of love. That night, Dulcy heard someone on the sidewalk singing a song Martha had loved:

  What do I love? I love you.

  Why do we love? I don’t know, but we do.

  Tell me true, love you blue, tell me why we do these things we do.

  When Dulcy’s mother died, Martha put the big, bent farmhouse through a ritual cleansing. She stripped the windows, sold the bed, painted the walls robin’s-egg blue, and installed an art desk, a piano, and a set of the Britannica ninth edition in what had been Philomela’s bedroom. And when her husband, Elam, died—still fond of Walton, still not understanding his daughter’s illness—Martha’s reaction was similarly abrupt: she leased the pastures and sold the prize hogs and cattle. She dyed her hair back to black, then to a hennaed black like nothing in nature, and wore it down. She looked like a native witch woman, which fascinated some of the children of Westfield, and terrified others. Older women usually took on a watered-down look, but Martha’s expression was still terribly sharp. She stopped doing anything she didn’t enjoy: no more church, or excessive cleaning, or visits to neighbors she disliked. She turned more fruit into wine and brandy and cider than jam, and she started to drink the results.

  It drove Dulcy’s nervy aunts, Grace and Alice, to fits. They’d spent their lives teaching at Miss Porter’s and had moved back to Westfield to help care for their addled father; they hoped to relax after the trauma of his raving deathbed. Martha, the reliable presence in life, was supposed to comfort. “What’s wrong with you?” asked Grace.

  “No
thing at all,” said Martha. It was years before she tipped face-forward into her peonies. She wasn’t a faddish woman, but peonies and clematis were her weak spots, and she never asked her farmhands for help with “frippery gardening.” She’d gone out to deadhead the spent blooms, and had been about to say something about Carrie’s beaux, or the cooking stains on Dulcy’s skirt, before she turned toward an excitement in a flock of cranes and dropped. She made a small recovery, but her heart faded, and her lungs weakened, and with the next attack, she sank like a fish with a broken tail, silently and quickly.

  •••

  The next morning, Dulcy was sure that Walton’s note was another delusion, and as he was being prettied up for his box, she showed Victor the Seattle accounts and the scrawl she’d taken to Schaub.

  “Schaub may take revenge?” asked Victor. “Little Schaub in the Gold Building?” The brown journal was open on his desk; she’d once again removed the Butte and Denver pages. His nice green eyes were red and bruised-looking, and his hands vibrated while he turned the pages one more time.

  “No,” said Dulcy. “You.”

  He looked down at his hands; she did, too, and felt sick. He pushed the notebook back toward her. “None of it was mine, Dulcy. Put it away for a trip.” He tapped the desk an inch from her fingers. “I’m ready to try a ship again, myself.”

  On the other hand, he seemed to think a magic box would open up now that Walton was dead. He asked the coroner if Walton might have swallowed a tube with paperwork. He had every book in the library shaken. He ordered Henning’s youngest, blondest brother to search the bedrooms, rip up the carpets, crawl the floor for loose boards. Everything Dulcy and Carrie owned was spread across the music room floor while they watched another Falk cut open the trunk linings. Victor fidgeted.

  “Please don’t be offended.”

  Dulcy thought Carrie might spit at his feet. “How would we manage that?”

  “I’m not suggesting you’ve hidden anything. I’m hoping that he did.”

  Victor insisted on a wake and had Walton’s coffin placed in the parlor. The January windows were open, and there was little need for ice around the casket. There was really no need for a viewing, either, since though Walton had always been good company at a dinner party, he’d known few people in Seattle. This wake was being held to prove to investors that the cause of death was a rumor, despite an item in the paper about an unnamed man leaping from an Elliott Bay window. The unnaming was all Victor’s doing; he was still a part owner of the Intelligencer , and he’d insisted on an open coffin for the same reason—how could a man fall so far and look so untouched? The mortician had been paid one hundred dollars to make a flat man look round and full and youthful. Nevertheless, Walton was bleached to the color of the inside of an oyster shell, no layer of fat to turn him candle-colored like Martha.

  People Dulcy had never met circled the coffin. Victor, who disliked talking to people at the best of times, had given up whiskey for port, but he was drinking quite a bit of it. The women circled him, too, but he stood near Dulcy and only paid attention to what the men suspected. He’d designed the black-rimmed memorial card—a globe in one corner and a pickaxe in the other, nothing about the ultimate earthbound man taking to flight—and he’d written the Intelligencer obituary:

  Walton Joseph Remfrey, Engineer and Inventor, Dies Suddenly

  Walton Joseph Nectan Remfrey, a regular visitor to our city, died yesterday at the Butler Hotel apartment of his partner, Victor Maslingen. He had been ill for several years.

  That much, at least, was true.

  Mr. Remfrey, well known in the scientific community for his forthright views and honest practices, was born sixty-three years ago in Perranuthnoe, Cornwall, and quickly orphaned. He came to San Francisco in 1868, later making his way from the silver mines of California and Nevada to the copper mines of Montana and Michigan. Mr. Remfrey was an inventor of many devices and a part owner, with Mr. Maslingen, of several mines in the Transvaal. At the time of his death, his properties included investments in Chile and Mexico. He is survived by a brother, Christopher John Remfrey of Pachuca, Mexico; two sons, Winston Austel and Walter Selevan Remfrey, both of New York City; and two daughters, the misses Clarissa Mabena Galatea and Leda Cordelia Dulcinea, who attended him in Seattle at the time of his death. They will accompany his body back to Westfield, New York, for burial at the Old Saint James Cemetery.

  Walton, who didn’t believe in God, had been fond of Cornish saints’ names, Shakespearean names, pompous names. His own hated namesake had been Nectan, a Cornish saint beheaded by pig thieves. Dulcy’s older brothers Winston and Walter (sons, after all, of a woman named Jane) had gotten off lightly in the naming wars, but when Jane had died giving birth to a third son, Walton, unfettered, named the blue baby Gabriel Maximus. After he married a woman named Philomela-nightingale!—he completely lost his mind. Galatea! Dulcinea! His last children, Philomela’s kitten-sized twins, needed an outsized headstone to hold their names: Perdita Dido Isolt Victoria and Edmund Orlando Pelleas Albert.

  Dead Jane was not on Walton’s conscience. She’d wanted more babies, and things went wrong all the time, the child a little turned, the leg a little in the wrong position. A little this, a little that; so much of the world ended or began that way. Philomela was another matter. She’d been short like Dulcy, willowy and silky and blond like Carrie, and she really did have a beautiful voice, even if she’d been named for an uncle named Philo instead of Ovid’s nightingale. She died a few years after the twins, ruined by and ruining Walton. But everyone had been ruined by something; that was the great lesson of following Walton to destroyed cities.

  Now Dulcy sat in a parlor with his body, thinking of a different sort of end, listening to sanctimonies. They might as well have been in John Wesley’s pit in Redruth. Home to his dear sweet Lord. Such a wanderer. Such a thinker. A genius, a saint in his way. Even Victor looked queasy. Walton would have said avoid these pretentious fucks (a phrase that brought back the lost accent: praytaintseeous fooooks); they brim with fecal matter. Most of them knew she had once been engaged to Victor; what did they think when they heard him refer to his fiancée and gesture in her direction?

  What she thought: fear and alarm, like the flash across Henning’s face. But she decided this was just another panicked way to save face, and so she sipped tea, nodded endlessly, tried to ignore the cloud of bad toilet water and tuberose, the scent of Walton’s body (not rot, but a breaking-open), the smell of the city’s coal fires and horseshit that swirled through the open window. She took her meals alone in her room, which had once been the custom when a dead man lay in a house; no one used to eat near a body. Carrie claimed to not eat at all, but at night, Dulcy heard Emil pad down the hall, bearing something that smelled like melted cheese. And later, other footsteps in the hall, but now he just stood in front of the new lock on the hall door. It was over, she thought; there was no point to him trying anymore, because he’d only ever wanted the money.

  At night, to keep from listening for footsteps, she made herself hear Walton sing through the bedroom wall, and in the dark she felt like she saw him clearly for the first time in years. From a distance, he’d seemed pale, tall, and fragile: a gentleman. He’d loved clothes and dressed well, with a fondness for soft gray wools and silks that didn’t abrade the imagined sores on his back or legs. But closer up, the face had seen sun, whiskey, death, and long dark hours, God knew what female parts; the hands, however beautifully manicured, were miner’s hands, down to the flattened left little finger. How did you get that? asked the girls when they were little, on a trip to Michigan. It takes talent, said Walton. It takes an affinity with a fulcrum.

  He’d never once been in a fight, and he’d seen no need to manufacture violence. No broken bones beyond the tip of that finger, no whorehouse brawls, no other injury to the body beyond syphilis until he hit the sidewalk on Second Avenue at a hundred miles an hour.
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  •••

  A religious sect had heard that a man had defenestrated from the Butler. They believed that flight was a route to rebirth, and the placards the members carried as they marched on the sidewalk below the hotel read Float High in His Heavenly Kingdom and We Are His Birds.

  Dulcy and Henning followed the show from above while they smoked on the parlor balcony a few feet from the casket. The men wore brocaded shirts, the women smock dresses, and the placards were peacock blue. “What religion do you follow?” asked Henning.

  “Nothing.”

  “What was he?”

  He cocked his head toward the open window behind them, and the casket. “Methodist, geologist,” said Dulcy, trying to drag out her cigarette. “Catastrophist. Please let me take him home.”

  Henning flicked two pennies from the balustrade without any reaction from the marchers below. “You don’t want to kill anyone, do you?” asked Dulcy.

  He’d reached into his pocket for more coins, but now he looked at her: not a warm look, but she hadn’t spoken with innocence. “What cow shit did your father tell you?”

  Henning still got phrases wrong. “That you killed your brother in-law.”

  “Oh.” He flicked another penny.

  •••

  She packed Walton’s trunk. The velvet lining had been restitched badly. Soft suits, shaving kit, five pairs of glasses, the lumps of copper and gold and silver, all the journals, even the green one, her book. She closed the lid as Victor watched, and she changed the label from Wm. Jos. Remfrey, The Butler, Seattle to Remfrey, 109 East 19th St., Manhattan . She used this address on her own trunk, too, though a welter of messages had landed from her brothers, grief giving way to rage and recrimination, avoidable telegrams to the telephone. They would meet their sisters in St. Paul and travel with them up to Westfield for the funeral. Dulcy said that Carrie had to go to the city first (Carrie, who had already locked herself in her room for the night, who had such belated remorse about her father that she said almost nothing to anyone), to see Alfred as soon as possible. “Nonsense,” said Winston. “She’s in mourning. They can talk later. You must both keep your heads down.”