The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  The Boys had been joyful and loud until they’d finished college and shrunk into life as it should be led, away from their father the libertine. Their wives were sweet but stupid, their politics basted with religion and money—they tended to conflate the two. They said Dulcy had made it possible for Walton to continue on his ludicrous path to ruin, allowed him to spray money every which way, allowed him to die. The money could have gone to charity or power, instead of whores, quack doctors, and first-class cabins. They didn’t give a shit for the great wide world Dulcy and Walton had waded across, and the hint—she’d only hinted—that Walton had lost any mining proceeds added to their rage. She should have followed him to Africa, once Martha was gone, “instead of flirting in Manhattan,” said Winston. “Just as you’re flirting now, in Seattle.”

  Dulcy tried to imagine the dialogue once they knew the truth. Victor’s financial loss was huge, but the Remfreys had stood to clear more than one hundred thousand dollars. During this last telephone call, an experience like dragging her face over gravel, Victor paced in the library, ostensibly because he fretted about the connection, possibly because he worried that Dulcy would open her own window. Henning came in and out; Dulcy tracked them both while she listened to the rage on the other end of the line. “These accounts—did he have the numbers wrong?” asked Winston.

  “Not according to small Schaub.”

  “And this ‘do as the journals say’—we have to read all ten thousand pages?”

  “No,” said Dulcy. “I have. I assume he meant the words he added at the end.”

  Boil me , burn me. The last page in every journal, written within minutes of the window, funeral wishes Walton might have borrowed from his fables. Dulcy thought of an officer they’d met on a long-ago visit to Yellowstone Park, who’d described what it had been like when a soldier had fallen into a boiling spring and had not been found for four hours. “Boiled shin,” said the officer. “And the meat smelled as if someone had dressed it with mustard and vinegar.”

  Maybe they were meant to drop Walton in a caldera, so that he could erupt anew like a steaming, randy phoenix. Dulcy tried the word cremation .

  “That’s nonsense,” said Winston. “Had he become some sort of addled Buddhist? We’ll bury him like a good Christian, just as soon as we can get his spotty body in the ground. ‘Boil me’? How far gone was the old idiot, anyway? Jesus suffering Christ.”

  Far gone enough to jump out a window, thought Dulcy. She let the tinny shrieks echo, but Winston wasn’t in the mood for reflecting on his own cruelty. “You gave him too much morphine. You wanted to keep him there,” he said.

  “If he’d had too much, he’d never have reached the window. And I’m not sure he cared to go anywhere, ever again. What was home, anyway?”

  “He had my home whenever he wanted it,” Winston snapped. “And real doctors. Why aren’t you on a train yet?”

  “We’re finishing up. Dad left things a mess. We’ll make the noon train tomorrow.”

  Victor, who’d had a bottle of wine at his very healthy dinner, had been quiet on the couch, but he now twitched out of a daydream. He disliked her brothers, and Dulcy found this no longer offended her. Henning was reading a telegram in the doorway, shushing a maid.

  “Bring the contracts,” Winston barked.

  “We’re sorting them out.”

  “‘We,’” snapped Winston. “That’s how it is again?”

  She shut her eyes, but when she opened them, Victor was still staring at the ceiling. “Go to hell,” said Dulcy calmly. “You believe in it, after all. Don’t meet us in St. Paul. I don’t want to have to talk to you.”

  “We don’t care what you want,” said Winston. “What you want has been entirely unsuccessful for the last ten years, and you allowed Da to run himself into his seedy little grave. We’ll meet you Monday morning and ride back with you. Then we’ll set up an income with what little’s left, and you can do what you like.”

  She put the phone down and thought: I can’t bear this. She couldn’t stand her own skin, all the things the Boys could and would say to Victor, the future that kept bobbing into sight. Her sense of dread was elephantine. She didn’t want to be herself anymore.

  Henning, in the hallway, met her eyes and pointed in the direction of the elevator: some problem. Stay, she thought.

  “Don’t leave Seattle,” said Victor. “Don’t leave me.”

  “I have to get Carrie home.” And Walton, she thought.

  “Marry me.” He touched the cloth of her skirt.

  She snapped it away. She could hear Henning’s voice fading in the hallway as he talked to the maid; she could hear the elevator climbing toward their floor. “You’re asking again because you think I have the money.”

  “No,” said Victor. “I’m asking again because I love you.”

  His head was thrown back on the divan. In the past, when he’d say something like that, and look right at her, just an inch away, she’d want to change it all. She’d want him to feel some extreme, she’d want to seduce; she’d want, as Walton would have said, to light a fire under his fucking ass. But now her skin crawled, and she felt clammy, and she could hear the elevator retreat. Henning and the maid were gone. “No,” said Dulcy.

  “With you, now, I don’t need to explain. Can you imagine what a relief that is? I hadn’t seen it that way, when I knew we had to bring you out here—so much anger, you can’t imagine—but now it is so lovely to simply be, and it makes me understand how close I could be, with a little effort, with someone who did understand.”

  She watched his fingers edge closer; she had to pass him to reach the door. “You know it’s not right,” she said. “You know we wouldn’t be happy. You can’t seem to be happy, not that way, and I want a little joy, Victor. Think about it. We like each other. We don’t want to make each other miserable.”

  “We don’t just like each other. It’s not as if I don’t have emotions, Dulcy.”

  “I know.” She could have ended it, but she said, “It’s not just that. But no.”

  He had an odd look on his face: excited, smug. “You could do as you like.”

  “You deserve better.”

  “No,” said Victor. “I don’t. I deserve you.”

  His hand closed on her skirt and pulled. She jerked back, and he knocked her down on the couch, a sweep of the tweed arm, no skin involved, and pinned her with the same arm while he worked on their clothes, a pillow over her mouth. He clubbed her on the side of the head when she kicked him; in the end, she turned so she could breathe while he slammed into her, and his breath streaming over her skin was the hardest thing to bear.

  Afterward, to prove the point, he pushed her down the hall to her bedroom and lay down next to her, “as lovers should.” He pretended to sleep while she sucked the blood off her teeth and felt her body ache. He kept his shoulder against hers, and she could feel a shiver whenever he moved, but when she heard Henning return and jerked upright, he pushed her down and kept his hand in place, right on the skin of her chest, while he talked and talked: he would follow her to New York, they would marry without waiting for the end of mourning, this roughness was only an anomaly, because she should have understood, she’d forgotten how hard things were for him; if she screamed, if she lied, he’d throw her out the window and tell her family she was a whore. She should think of how fine it would be, how easy always ever onward. She should understand he’d do this to her until she loved him again.

  She lay back in the dark and let him talk, and talk, more hot breath poisoning her skin. What he said had nothing to do with her, because she would leave the next day, and he would never see her again.

  MY IMPORTANT TRAVELS

  1862: Falmouth to Allihies (one visit home, 1864).

  1867 – 1868: Falmouth to Bluefields, Chagres, Valparaiso and Cerro Blanco, Panama City to San Francisco.

 
1869 – 1872: California, Nevada, Arizona.

  1872 – 1877: Between Michigan and New York,ad infinitum; to Redruth with Jane, and back.

  1878 – 1879: Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Chile.

  1880 – 1882: To Plymouth, retrieving the Boys; Keweenaw and Butte and Colorado.

  1883: To Cerro Blanco and Pachuca and Paris.

  1884 – 1890: Keweenaw and Butte; Arizona, Idaho, Pachuca, Cerro Blanco; the Transvaal (several trips to each).

  1891: To the Transvaal and New Zealand and Australia.

  1892, March: To Keweenaw and Montreal; August: To Persia and Syria and Hungary.

  1893: To Paris and Berlin and Vienna.

  1894: Pachuca, Chile, Hawaii.

  1895: Madrid, Seville, Lesbos and Izmir, Constantinople, Trieste.

  1896, February: The Transvaal; June: California and Montana and Minnesota.

  1897, January: Pachuca; April: Barcelona, Florence; August: Japan, the Transvaal, Assam.

  1898, January: Butte; March: Iceland, Amsterdam, Berlin.

  1899, January: Crete, Damascus, et cetera, Vienna and Copenhagen; October: Johannesburg,et cetera.

  1900, January: London, Paris; June: Butte and Seattle; October: Cape Town,et cetera.

  1901, January: Cuba, Pachuca, California; India, Cape Town, et cetera.

  1902, January: England, Lisbon, Cape Town, et cetera, Sicily, Salonica, Naples, Pachuca.

  1903, January: Cairo, Alexandria, Turkey, Munich, Bucharest; August: Cape Town, Santa Barbara.

  1904, February: To Nice, Athens, Paris; July: Cape Town, et cetera.

  —from Walton Remfrey ’s gray notebook

  chapter 5

  The Sea-Gray Book of Travel

  •

  When Dulcy was fifteen, Walton decided she should come along on his trips. He needed an aide for his work and his health, and he argued that while she had finished all the schooling Westfield offered, she was too young for university. He had to argue, because Martha was in charge.

  Dulcy wanted to go, despite misgivings about a life of uninterrupted Walton. Her aunts thought this was an awful idea: if Dulcy was too young for Vassar, she was too young for Walton’s life. Martha had mixed feelings; she was worn out by Elam’s illness and worried about a neighbor’s bored sons: one had impregnated a doctor’s daughter; the other had bombed a Civil War memorial in the town square. Dulcy was the closest game in sight. So she gave her blessing, with the understanding that Dulcy would begin college the following year.

  On that first trip, Walton assessed ancient, derelict tin mines in Spain before they sailed east toward a Turkish earthquake. Dulcy began her collection of cracks-in-the-ground snapshots and averted her mind from the almost visible stink coming from under a collapsed rug factory. Walton sometimes claimed parity of carnage, but that was an illusion: palaces stayed upright; huts collapsed. When cholera broke out they retreated to Constantinople, where Walton disappeared for three days, then made their way to Trieste for a hastily arranged clinic.

  Walton, who aimed for places in the habit of collapsing, almost always ended a trip with his own collapse. He thought he saw a sore begin in Trieste, and nearly killed himself with mercury; after they came back to Westfield to recover, he traveled to Africa and ruined himself all over again. The next summer, after wandering around the West, he stalled at a clinic in Minnesota until Dulcy missed the beginning of another college year.

  Dulcy the traveler: she had spent more than a year of her life on a boat, and easily another year on trains or other wheeled conveyances. Though most subsequent summers were spent with Martha in Westfield while Walton traveled to southern Africa or South America on mining business, every fall they’d set out together for destinations selected more for disaster than commerce. They’d each board with a steamer trunk, a valise (novels for Dulcy, his own prose for Walton), and a grip for her toiletries and one for Walton’s potions. If Walton planned to test new equipment, or hoped to bring back specimens, he brought an extra trunk. The family apartment on 19th Street bowed under the weight of samples.

  Dulcy usually stopped being sick after a first day’s diet of crackers and coffee beans. Walton, despite testing lemons, chloroform, creosote, and weevily biscuits, always persevered, eating breakfast and blustering up to the deck as if there were no issue, then rushing to the side. His stomach always settled at cocktail time. “Why don’t you just drink all day?” she asked once.

  “Stopping is difficult when you reach dry land,” said Walton.

  She had her days to herself, and would take to the deck with a book, holding it up to her face and wearing her blue glasses for extra opacity. The chaise lounges were usually bolted down, but the fastenings were almost always loose; she read to a sway-lurch rhythm. Sometimes, to escape the wind or her fellow man-ships’ doctors were often handsome, but there was always some good reason, gradually revealed, that they were marooned on a boat—she read in the nooks behind lifeboats. After the first few days she’d talk to people, and play: cards on still days, chess or dice or shovelboard when it was windy. Ringtoss was more exciting in high seas, after dinner and wine; after dinner and wine, she’d become a social butterfly. In the morning, the fact that she always found this transformation surprising depressed her.

  On land, outside of cities, the reality of travel was difficult. Walton packed an India rubber bath, which liked to collapse suddenly, and his medicines often shattered, the fumes poisoning fellow travelers. Travel meant being wet and cold or dry and hot; it meant hours in enclosed spaces with people who stank of urine and bad meat and heartbreak. Pushy, mustachioed men in uniform, demanding imaginary paperwork at sudden borders; dusty telegraph offices and banks with wayward hours and false coinage; mysterious meat, leathery fruit. It meant chalets de nécessité that either disappeared or overflowed, insects skittering over mattresses or rappelling down at high speed from dark ceilings, the flutter of bats and whisper of mice. Even the best hotels had paperthin walls, so that she could hear Walton snore or hum badly or—most nights—treat her to the suctioning sound of bodies on bad mattresses. He’d opened the wide world for her but sluiced away her joy.

  Dulcy was good at washing out clothes, pinning her hair and hat for the wind, daydreaming miles into submission. She was hopeless at speaking anything beyond bits of French, but she could read several languages and was evocative with hand gestures. She knew all about train and ship menus and was particularly well versed in post-disaster hotel menus, tentative stabs at normalcy. After an earthquake, the bread always tasted of plaster dust, and scraps of meat were always high. She’d developed a fondness for lentils and garbanzo beans after nights spent huddled near open stinking pots. She trusted very old cheeses.

  •••

  On her last morning in Seattle, Victor crept away from her room before the apartment began to wake, before the world had any color, a gray shape in gray light. He’d been staring at her for an hour, believing that she was asleep; he would believe anything, sometimes.

  She scrubbed herself at the sink and slipped away, too. She’d had plenty of time to think, but only a few hours before the train left for errands that were now necessary. When she came back, Henning’s head jerked around for a long look, but she shut her door in his face. They had all misjudged.

  When she opened the door again that afternoon, he was waiting with a bellboy, and they made a last trip to the Seattle station. Victor hadn’t emerged to say good-bye, but he’d given Henning a note to pass on, and Henning didn’t look at her directly when he put it in her hand as he helped the sisters onto the eastbound Empire Builder. They stood in the train passageway and listened to Carrie retch in the cabin toilet. She’d already been sick on her mourning dress.

  “What will you do?” Henning asked. He was braiding the silk strings on an extra luggage tag.

  “I wish I were dead,”
she said.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, turning to leave. “You wish you were dead to some people.”

  She didn’t watch him go—he’d failed her. She left Carrie to her misery and walked down to the lounge as the train began to roll. No one paid attention; her damage was under her hair, under her clothes, though her lips were swollen and beginning to darken. Her muscles ached, her vulva ached, and she felt almost as nauseated as her sister, but the train would soon reach the east side of Lake Washington, and leave Victor in the fog. She found a seat, and then she made herself think.

  And by the time Carrie had joined her, Dulcy saw no reason to accept life as she knew it. She’d worked herself into a new daydream, a new past, a bit of salvation: she’d had a husband, and he’d been:

  Handsome, intelligent, and sane. Yet somehow (of necessity) tragic.

  A wastrel, with a divisive, disowning family.

  Someone in between, someone she hadn’t imagined yet.

  Her eyes passed over a quartet of women playing whist and landed on a pale man who’d entered the car and paused, taking his time before choosing a seat. He didn’t bother looking at the sisters Remfrey, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t sized them up from the beginning. Dulcy liked the way he looked, and his expression: both bemused and indifferent. She decided that her husband had been pale and tall and dark-haired, romantically gaunt, nothing like Victor.

  The train climbed out of coastal rain and into snow, leaving gulls for crows and ravens. Dulcy faced east with the movement, and the large flakes whipped out of tall dark conifers, aiming at her eyes. Carrie dozed with a magazine on her lap, plump lips open, making small horking noises. Dulcy leaned the side of her head against the window, trying for a position that didn’t hurt, but her skull was bruised, and the glass glowed with cold, and her pride couldn’t quite bear it—one sister snoring, one pasted to a window like a halfwit.