The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  It would have been convenient if Victor, instead of boring the world to death talking about the war in Cuba and the Philippines, had enlisted, been shot, and never met her, and this got to the point: she wasn’t sure she could imagine being married to someone who would have volunteered. She hadn’t been part of the fever, and now even newspapers were tired of it, which couldn’t compete with the way the men stuck in the Philippines felt about the mess.

  She dozed, and looked up to locate a hissing sound, a flurry of motion: the insurance man was waving a newspaper at the young man with the missing fingers, whose eyes were closed. Dulcy thought he was pretending until she took in the half-open mouth, the long, outstretched leg in the aisle, and an equally unfettered pyramid at his crotch. The insurance man threw his newspaper on the younger man’s lap, and his eyes flickered open as the paper slipped off. The older man stared pointedly, and the younger man looked down. He reached for his derby and dropped it on his lap, without apparent embarrassment.

  The insurance man, as ever, relied on conversation. “What do you write about, then?” he asked.

  “Unions and immigrants and politics,” said the young man. “Brown people and the Irish and lynchings, and nasty, selfish Anglo-Saxons such as ourselves. Plenty of things to say.”

  The insurance man finally changed his seat.

  •••

  Dusk, Butte: half of the passengers climbed off and headed for streetcars. These were the paler immigrants, the city people, not the red-faced farmers who’d disappeared into the frozen grass of eastern Washington. Dulcy studied a dozen skinny clouds rising from the city on the hill. They looked like volcano plumes, dragon exhalations, and it took her a moment to realize she was seeing steam from the mines. When she’d come through here at sixteen, Walton had explained, ad nauseam, the strangeness of a city built on an anthill, tunnels that stretched a mile down, engines rumbling below department stores and fancy hotels. Dulcy had thought it might all cave in, but he’d said that Butte was no different, really, than Paris or Rome, any city built over old mausoleums and sewers. The rock and ore underneath wouldn’t dissolve like the salt mines in Normandy or Austria.

  Though these tunnels were much, much deeper. She wondered if the city was somehow steam-heated, and if the steam smelled like metal, and if the metal smelled like blood from all the men who’d died and never been brought back. There were no trees, and there was barely any grass. This was the place that had made most of Walton’s fortune, where his two real patents for hoist parts had panned out (as it were), but most of his time here had been spent fine-tuning his magnometer, an invention to warn the world of earthquakes. Butte was only a hundred miles from Yellowstone Park, where the earth shuddered every day, but the magnometer had failed. It hadn’t been able to foresee any of the Yellowstone vibrations, or even distinguish them from dynamite blasts in the mines.

  The dining car was mostly empty; next to her, Carrie was halfway through another letter to Alfred. The cardplayers and the red beards had left in Anaconda, and no new passengers wandered on: however grim Butte looked, no one seemed to want to leave it. The man with the missing fingers was out on the platform, trick bowler firmly on his head, taking in the raggedy view of the hill. He paced with more energy than he’d shown on the train; she watched his breath turn white and followed his view and realized that one of the dozen plumes rising from the hillside was black, not white, smoke rather than steam. A boy carrying a hot box sold him a meat pie. When he bit in, there was another explosion of steam, a miniature replica of the background fumaroles.

  “Might be a terrible thing,” said the disaster-loving conductor, looking at the plume. “Of course, you don’t need a fire to kill people down there. Those hoists go down, rocks go down. And gas. You know, they look alive when they pull them out after that kind of accident. Pink-skinned.”

  Carrie looked up, annoyed by the piping, asinine voice. Both the sisters Remfrey, one-time daughters of a one-time mining engineer, pursed their pretty lips at the idiot civilian.

  •••

  Gas victims didn’t stay pink for long. The first time that Dulcy and Carrie had been on a real trip with their father, in 1892, they’d visited the copper mines of Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, where many of Walton’s new hoist mechanisms had also been installed, and where he was testing another warning device, a machine for the detection of dangerous gasses. They took trains and ferries west from the huge depot at Buffalo. The trip had been wildly exciting, and Walton had been patient and wonderful. Philomela had been dead for two months, and he let his daughters wear her flamboyant, too-large hats.

  But after a week of Calumet and Hecla dinners, ice skating, and drilling contests—wiry violent men with picks, sparks flying—an explosion occurred without Walton’s warning device chiming, crippling one of Walton’s unstoppable hoists. An hour later three crimson-skinned blond men lay in the snow, looking like photo negatives. Carrie and Dulcy darted around, trying to escape weeping housewives, while Walton bellowed at the engine crew. Any ground that wasn’t covered by snow glittered with shards of quartz and feldspar, and Dulcy worried that the dead men would be cut open unless someone put a blanket underneath them.

  On the way back to Westfield, Walton had been in a suspended state, rage as a kind of jelly holding his mind in one piece. This time they rode the northern route and took a suite in the St. James Hotel in Montreal. Walton bought them books and games, and told them to order anything they wanted from the kitchen, and to go anywhere they wanted within the walls of the hotel. He disappeared for the next five days, then bundled them home without explanation. For a long time Dulcy assumed that this was when he’d made himself sick, but she later understood that Walton had earned his syphilis in Paris just after Carrie was born. He’d given the disease to Philomela, and to the twins, and it had killed them all.

  •••

  East of Butte, another rockslide, another “short delay.” Dulcy tried to enjoy the battened-down chaos as the galley staff served courses at an angle. From the uphill side of the table, she watched the liquor in the last of the Seattle oysters dribble toward Carrie, a wine sauce oozing away from a partridge in viscous waves. Carrie kept down a cheese soufflé and veal. Dulcy didn’t joke about this new fondness for chewing up baby animals. In the far corner, the handsome, blank-faced blond man still stared into space.

  “Does Alfred read?” she asked Carrie.

  “Of course he reads,” said Carrie. “I can’t claim it’s any good—it’s all adventure stuff—but I believe he’s still recovering from college.”

  Dulcy, who hadn’t gotten to go, disliked Alfred for complaining. Sadness percolated into pettiness, on its way to a truly evil mood: there were so many ways to make Carrie not miss her. She signaled the porter. “You’re a lush,” said Carrie.

  “You’re a brat,” said Dulcy. “Let’s not be hard on each other.”

  They simmered, they were sorry, they loved each other. Their lives had been filled with passing tiffs, and this too would pass if it were given time. An hour later, after the train finally began to creep uphill again, she told Carrie she felt ill. “If you think you’ll give me something, warn me now,” said Carrie. “This is the first day I haven’t been sick in weeks.”

  “So many people left the train,” said Dulcy. “I should see if another cabin is available. We need to think of your health now.”

  There were four open cabins, and only one party boarding before morning. Carrie blew a kiss good night and floated off to her private kingdom just as the train began to roll again. No backward glance, no instinct for the moment. It should have been a relief, but Dulcy had trouble grinding her way through a conversation with the porter: she requested a bottle of mineral water and some shortbread, declined turn—down service or tea. She didn’t want to be bothered at all, even for breakfast. The porter, worried that she’d mess up her cabin in some horrific fashion, returned with towe
ls and a bowl and a little sign for the door: Quiet is Appreciated .

  When Dulcy was finally alone, she locked the door and curled on the lower bunk and wept: shuddering, galvanic sobs. She felt like her brain was being exposed to the air; she wondered if the pillow would still be wet when they looked for her in the morning.

  But she was running out of time, and when she finally rose, she stripped off her clothes quickly, ripped lace from the sleeve of her black dress and tore more strands from her thin shawl, then wound the dress and shawl around the brick blanket warmer she’d hidden the night before and tied the bundle tight with her stockings. She’d hidden a canvas bag within her other luggage, and she changed into the warm navy stockings and sturdier boots, the dress and wool coat she’d bought on the last Seattle morning while Victor hid in his room, things Carrie had never seen. She waited at the window, swaying as the train caught up with the map. When it curled and lowered its head somewhere after Whitehall, she tugged the pane down, and when the sound echoed and she could almost smell the cold water below, she guessed at a trestle and threw the bundle—the things Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey would have been wearing when she killed herself—into the dark. She stuffed the scrap bits of lace and wool in the corner of the window and pulled it up an inch to trap them. Then she waited again, holding on to the frame—open just wide enough for a woman’s body—until her fingers froze.

  The brightly lit Bozeman platform came as a shock: it was filled with men and women in ball gowns and furs, half of them carrying champagne bottles. It took a moment to recover, and Dulcy was about to leave the window for the corridor when the crowd parted for the two-fingered man, her own very tired veteran, who vaulted down from the still-moving train with such youth and grace that he was almost unrecognizable. As people pushed past, he reached down to change his grip on his bag and looked back up at the train, straight at the stunned woman in the window, who wore a red hat after days in mourning black. He smiled, the kind of glowing, frank smile he would never have given if he thought he’d see her again, and then he walked away.

  Dulcy stepped back into the shadows of the cabin and listened to the fancy-dress drunks invade the corridor—Kiss me, howled a man—as the train creaked away from the station. She dug out the guide. These idiots were getting off in Livingston or Big Timber, but it was a long, long ride after that, a bleak world of small towns where people—people who weren’t drunk—would notice anyone new. She thought of the emptiness she’d seen to the east on the earlier trip with Walton, and she began to panic. As the train rose and fell over another pass, she tilted the guide toward the moonlight, and when it slowed again, she pushed into the corridor, leaving the quiet sign on the door behind her. She launched herself down the metal steps to the cold half—lit bricks of a platform and paused, shocked by the size of the grand brick depot, before blending into the opera crowd as it invaded the building, looking for warmth until their rides arrived. A woman in a feather boa ran by singing a solo from Aida , and a man scrambling after her fell on the wet marble. The eastbound train began to roll again, and through the depot’s tall windows, Dulcy watched Carrie and Walton disappear.

  She was second in the ticket line, behind a confused old man who spoke only Norwegian, and she booked a ticket for a cabin on the next westbound train, due through at ten. She walked toward a wooden bench to wait, a little surprised by the sound of her steps in the emptying depot, by the first subtle sounds after days of listening to an engine, a track, movement.

  Dulce:

  Know that I do blame myself, that I can only assume my very poor example has somehow infected your mind. But for the same reason, I am aware that you know better, and I hope you will understand you cannot treat people of fine intention like shit on your pretty shoes. If, as you state, you do not even love the poor fellow, I must assume you did this thing out of sheer perversity, perverse curiosity. Was it meant as some sort of test? You have harmed your body, you have harmed his heart, and I can only imagine what I will need to do to redeem the business relationship. You must learn not to drag people back and forth on a chain, the direction according to mood and no rational notion whatsoever.

  If you will not reconsider, you and I will leave tomorrow, to do what we can to repair the problem. I suggest you send a letter of apology to Mr. Maslingen before we sail.

  —Your loving father, WR

  chapter 6

  Miss Remfrey is Lost

  •

  A woman gets off one train and onto another, and no one human sees both moments. Of the people who notice her at all, the men remember thick dark hair (worn up: a married woman), her shape and nervousness, and the women see the red hat, the hint of the blue dress. She was pale, not so pretty as to be worth long study, and her good taste might have been accidental. They remember that she did not wear mourning, and that she was alone, and self-possessed. They assume she was well traveled, and married, and not a crazy girl who’d fling her body out of a train window.

  •••

  Walton liked to introduce Dulcy as “a child of my dotage,” which was annoying, given that the dotage was of his own making. Every trip began with a virtuous air—a promising mine to be checked, a surprising earthquake to be researched—and then the relief of having done his duty would light Walton like a firework, and he would slide off to fuck himself to death. He never, truly, saw it coming. While different hues of doctors treated him with mostly identical means—mercury and iodine enemas, purple potions and electric therapy—Dulcy learned to be anonymous. By the time she disappeared, she knew how to move, and how to be alone.

  The only true anomaly was the trip to London in early 1902 after the engagement. This time, she was the patient: the best clinic in the world, but things went badly, and painfully; the pregnancy had been tubal, in the wrong place all along, and would have killed her in a month or two. The doctors sewed her up and told her she would now never bear a child.

  She wondered sometimes if her aversion hadn’t just been to Victor, but to fate. She liked children; she liked being alive. Despite any number of horror stories, she’d assumed these two things would go together.

  After she seemed to recover, Walton took her to Cornwall. In Redruth, she met her great-uncle Edmund, who was elongated and dark like Walton, religious like Walton’s brother, Christopher, bitter like neither of them. She saw her grandparents’ graves in the pretty seaside town of Perranuthnoe. Away from the coast, Cornwall was a raw, sad place, boarded-up adits and slag piles, but when she pointed this out, Walton forgot his own disdain for his birthplace. Weeks of anger at having to deal with someone else’s drama burbled out: Dulcy knew nothing about grubbing underground from infancy on to an early death, about her relative good fortune. He’d shown her tragic childhoods, everywhere they’d gone.

  In early March, they sailed on to Lisbon and saw the damage still evident from the earthquake of 1755: fifty thousand dead, many in churches that collapsed during the All Saints’ service, most in the tidal surge, some in the final fire. Walton said one hundred thousand, and that the same wave drowned the Azores and cracked the Galway city wall. Edmund, the sour uncle, had been told as a child that a wave had hit Penzance after this event. Walton claimed to be dubious, but she knew he was thrilled. He loved the notion of waves.

  Dulcy looked down on the city from her hotel and wondered at how arbitrary Lisbon’s hell had been—death by water while the city burned above, burning alive while water was visible. The blue-black harbor was still and deep and inviting, and the urge to drop into the sea stayed with her to Cape Town. She was seasick for the first time in years, and as she dangled over the edge she tried to come up with an equation to balance the cold and violence of the drop with the nausea and hopelessness of the deck. She worried about what she’d see before she died, as she sank. She didn’t want to panic; she didn’t want to see a beast rise up to meet her.

  The plan in 1902 had been for Dulcy to stay with Walton al
l the way to the Transvaal, but by the time they landed in Cape Town she was ill, not seasick. Africa was a long hallucination. She’d read an account of the Siege of Mafeking (a dizzy blend of bicycle races and decapitations), and she was braced for starving blacks and Boer children in camps, but her fever kept her in a coastal villa so Cornish that it might have been in St. Ives, if it weren’t for the plants and the bird calls, the servants with gold-ringed toes. She sat on a veranda above the ocean, imagining shark fins cutting through the surf while dozens of Cornish engineers trouped in and out, talking diamonds and gold, copper and silver. Smoke and voices spooled through the shutters of Walton’s office, every man and thing smelling of tobacco and saddle soap and curry, scents that clashed with the heat and the cloying flowers from the garden. These men looked and sounded the same in Chile, Keweenaw, Butte, as they had in Cornwall; they all tended to look like Walton, Celtic instead of Anglo-Saxon, lean and dark instead of rosy and blond. They looked like the Irish, though you couldn’t say that to either group. Only Robert Woolcock was distinctive: he had a great knob of a nose and tiny happy blue eyes; he used a deep bass voice on a huge repertoire of dirty song lyrics, all set to church melodies, and his was the only voice Dulcy enjoyed as her fever worsened. Walton said they drank more because she was in the next room and sick, but she could mark the moment each night when they forgot she was there, a half-dozen men cackling and crooning and passing a decanter. Not a bottle—that would have been Irish.

  Then she worsened, Victor’s child killing her again. Walton found a turbaned doctor who sliced her open for a second time and fed her iridescent medicines with an ivory spoon, while Walton lurked around the room. The doctor thought Walton was beside himself with worry, and he probably was, but Dulcy knew he was circling the doctor’s medicines, looking for the exotic, for a cure, for orange pearls of tropical wisdom, liquid green marvel.