The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  Dulcy imagined this as steam from a kettle, the blinding puff of an opened oven. She had just opened an oven for a chicken pie, flavored with some of the items she’d smuggled home from Italy. None of the articles Dulcy ever found mentioned the fer-de-lance invasion, possibly because the larger details—three humans alive, thirty thousand dead—took precedence, and possibly because Walton made things up.

  •••

  Dulcy burrowed into her lair at the Elite, drowned herself under Mrs. Knox’s soft corduroy quilt. She admired the clear yet soothing quality of light, rather than getting back on the Great Northern to New York and a ship. Rather than many things. She beat back a childish urge to bolt for Christopher in Mexico, mostly by considering a life of church and bitter letters from the Boys and Carrie, Grace and Alice. Not to mention Victor. Not to even think of Victor.

  She’d worked through a stack of books she’d bought in Denver, and the last in the pile was a roman à clef about the Spanish War by a man named Maximillian Cope. A History of a Small War was funny, and rude, and full of convenient detail. The narrator enlisted to escape an engagement, and was put to use as a sharpshooter; he discovered he reacted badly to killing people (he drank, he found women) and managed to escape that, too: he spent most of Cuba in a hospital with malaria, and most of the Philippines in a hospital because of a misfired shell. When he returned to New York he found his fiancée had jilted him, and so he got on a westbound train and seduced a married woman before he reached Chicago. The end offered a refreshing lack of redemption or punishment.

  Dulcy, who wasn’t in a judgmental mood, finished the book that afternoon and daydreamed her way through it for another hour, reworking her own story.

  She had dinner, a gristly pork pie, brought to her room. She’d sent the tiny bellboy out for a newspaper, and he found a Times, where she read of a massive blizzard in New York, snow three feet deep on Fifth Avenue, while she drank a bottle of Cahors and took a long bath. She saw a notice for the speedy Hamburg-American ship Deutschland, ninety dollars and up for first class, sailing from New York on February 7 for Genoa. Dulcy thought about the meals and the wind on the deck and the rocking, luxurious berth. She could have one if she got back onto a train immediately. Victor didn’t do well in boats, but he also didn’t do well in small towns with middling hotels. He’d hate the wind; it would muss his hair, and everything would be out of his control.

  When she couldn’t sleep, she thought about the letter she’d sent to him.

  By now you know I’m willing to die to be free of you, just as my father was. Perhaps you can find some way to be happy in your very unhappy body and soul, but I think no one can help you, no one will love you, and nothing will change you. You cause pain; you are unredeemable.

  She hoped the words had ground down on his soul. It would have been so much simpler if he’d been the one to go, instead of her. She daydreamed about his end; it was like counting sheep. Sometimes she imagined the smug look on his face just before he was hit by a train, by lava, by falling rocks (it was important, in this vaporous revenge, for Victor to have moments of understanding that some pieces of the world moved without his approval; hideous pain and public shaming were included, revelations of his cruelty, his physical failures, the deaths that didn’t trouble him). In a favorite scenario, Victor was in the gym at the Butler, weeping over her supposed death, when the ground began to shake, and the building crumbled over him, and for weeks the investors who’d taken his money and kissed his ass (somehow in a way other than the way she and Walton and Henning, who always survived these daydreams, had kissed his ass), would have to smell his stinking, unlovely corpse under the rubble.

  Victor crumbled, he burned. But that night, in the warmth of the Elite, she imagined him freezing to death in an alley, magpies prying out jewel-sized bites of green eye, and she slept well.

  •••

  The next morning, she heard cows lumber through town and the occasional engine on the frozen street. The small porter, whose name was Irving, brought coffee and announced that the temperature was ten below zero. “Don’t go out,” he said.

  “How cold might it get?” she asked.

  “Thirty under tonight. Forty.” His eyes were uneven, and after he heard a question, there was always a lull, as if he were waiting for an invisible translator to make sense of the line. He wheezed and spat and was not long for this world; Dulcy tipped him well.

  She draped herself in black and took the long hall to the stairs and the main lobby of the Elite, which looked like a different country in the daylight, after sleep: airy and high-windowed, but weighed down by trophies of moose and buffalo and Amazonian fish, all with glass eyes that followed her progress like bad actors, like the dozen guests who studied her with unapologetic curiosity and the tall, dark desk girl, who wore a filigree sign on her breast: Irina . Dulcy decided that this was not the time to place a telephone call. She walked through the doors as if she knew where she was going.

  The illusion of golden warmth shriveled in the wind, and within two blocks she returned to fantasies of Italy. She opted for the first bank she came to, made her deposit with a shiny-faced banker, and took a medium-sized safety deposit box.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Nash,” said the banker.

  Mrs. Nash had a short name and a flowing signature. She tucked the account card and key into her blue bag, and she walked away, mind blinking.

  The library was just a block away, so new that only the periodical room was in use, and a banner advertised a grand opening that spring. A long table of women looked up from pots of glue and virgin circulation cards while she selected a stack of novels, and continued to watch while she pulled on eyeglasses and searched the eastern papers.

  She didn’t find a notice for Walton, but she did for Carrie.

  Miss Clarissa Mabena Galatea Remfrey became the bride of Dr. Alfred Lorrimer, a cardiologist, on Wednesday afternoon, the 25th of January, at the Manhattan home of her brother, Walter Remfrey. All concerned are greatly relieved that a ray of happiness will shine upon the bride during her double bereavement; this happiness was her father’s dying wish.

  Small miracles. Dulcy fished around for sadness, but though the idea of never seeing Carrie again always smacked her in the throat, the idea of missing the wedding only brought relief.

  She scanned the local papers. In neighboring Big Timber, a smallpox patient had escaped the pesthouse in his nightshirt, danced down a sidewalk, and run into a busy saloon. In Livingston, Winslow Mercantile had both fresh oysters and nice oranges, and the town was going through a winter rash of divorces, dead children, and poisoned cats: this newspaper, lacking meaningful news, listed every drama. In the Billings Gazette she found an item about the search for Leda Remfrey, now firmly centered in Miles City, where a girl of her description had been seen singing dementedly by the river. Dulcy felt something close to happiness—a little smugness—but on the editorial page, someone with the byline S. Peake brought her out of a placid mood:

  Why come this far on a train, to die under a train? The following souls have recently ended their lives in this way on Western lines, and it behooves thinking people to ask if the sheer emptiness of the region calls out to the suicide.

  A drunk in Missoula accelerated a green Rambler toward the tracks in an automobile on January 8. We do not know his last words, either, though the three people with him presumably heard them.

  A bereaved girl threw herself from the window of the Empire Builder on January 16 or 17, and chose the least comforting landscape possible in which to die: namely the area between Butte and the Dakota line.

  Young Alexander Tuck, heir to a ranching fortune, dropped between the cars just outside of Billings on January 27. He had been wronged financially by his partner and could not face his family.

  The mangled body of another girl was found near the tracks east of Livingston only yesterday. We h
ave no idea when she took her last ride.

  All of these people acted on what could only be profound despair. Our long winter exacts a toll.

  These were the people she’d decided not to be. Dulcy thought of Alexander Tuck’s beautiful eyes, the way he’d dropped his pen and the pages of explanation. She wondered again if Walton had fallen with his eyes open, and if he’d focused on the sky, or screwed them shut to everything but memory and wind.

  She heard a muffled crash and craned her neck to see out of the library window. A cart had blown over on the street, and men ran to help free the horse from its harness, hopping over unfurling rolls of canvas. The tail of the struggling horse whipped the men trying to cut the traces, and their coats pillowed out in the wind.

  She flipped back to the front page. The unidentified girl found the day before was described as likely one of the town’s “unfortunates,” a euphemism that made her brain ache. The cold weather made it hard to be specific about the time of death—she may have lain in the snow for weeks—but the unfortunate had been in her mid-twenties with an average build and dark hair, and an undated chit from a Spokane restaurant in her coat. Dulcy wondered if they’d been on the same train on the same night, two suicides waiting for the right moment.

  Darling —I should have been patient, but you always wanted me to be capable of impulse, and strong feeling, out of my head and free with delight. I can only do better, and you surely know I’ve never loved anyone as I love you, and I will continue to try. Your touch and your voice are what I long for; I have proved that now, haven’t I? A safe journey, and I will join you at the funeral.

  —Your beloved V, 14 January

  chapter 9

  The Jade Book of Elite Observations

  •

  I n her first week at the Elite, Dulcy spoke to no one but hotel staff, the librarian, and store clerks. She had most meals sent up and spent her time reading in the sun of her south window. She read books that annoyed her, about people who (not being real) could die with meaning, and she moved to the east window whenever a train arrived, to gauge its passengers for Victor’s spies. When the lobby seemed quiet, she’d slip outside and slide on frozen clay streets, mummy-wrapped in woolen scarves as she zigzagged toward the river—snapping ice and steam and eagles—wishing she’d never left the Elite, wishing she’d never left anything. She would begin to bawl (silently, but this was no polite ooze from a pretty corner of the eye), keeping her eyes down on the black ribbons on her skirt, the warped, icy sidewalk boards.

  When these spasms passed—Carrie was better off without her, Walton was better off out of pain, and Victor would ideally spin on a pike and die alone—she would feel like she was holding her breath. She wanted to burst into movement like a child, like a horse losing its head and bolting. No one can make me do anything, thought Dulcy. Running away was childish, but was it cowardly to run into a new world alone? It made her feel tired, and it made her feel lonely in a new, hard way. Aloneness had always been finite: Walton would be discharged from a clinic or die, and she would go home to both Martha and a future. She hadn’t considered the oddity of not even being able to write a letter to another being, or the implication: she no longer existed.

  This thought took her to Vogt Liquors, and then to bed. After two sodden days, she cleaned herself up, smuggled the empty bottles out to an alley bin, and took to the lobby, an invisible widow who kept her face plain and pointed in books. Mrs. Knox’s desk girl, Irina Dis, spilled tea onto Dulcy’s plate without apology, letting her know she knew Mrs. Nash was a dipsomaniac.

  The chair Dulcy liked best was near a frayed Boston fern, and the people who moved through the room gradually assumed she was one, and went back to their own dramas. Watching and listening chipped away at the problem of having no actual life, and little idea of how to begin one. The fern chair gave her a view of the teatime crowd, and the beginning of the cocktail hour; a corner table in the dining room, perched near the kitchen door, gave her breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of the newspaper’s doors opened into the lobby, which in turn opened onto both a dining room and a saloon, and she watched the paper’s staff ply sources. The editor, Samuel Peake, was a slight man with dark hair, a sad voice, a long nose, and putty skin. He’d been the one to write about bodies dotting the plains, but he always looked amused as he and his assistant, a slender young man named Rex Woolley, wined and dined everyone: beer and sausage for police and railroad contacts, whiskey and cheese toasts for businessmen and doctors, claret and oysters for the bankers and lawyers. When the newspapermen were in the restaurant, words like divorce and insane and blackmail and fiend left a kind of vibration in the air.

  It was stunning what a person could hear in such a hubbub. Dulcy listened hard; so did Irina and the head maid, Rusalka Havic. They were from Trieste and Bucharest, either end of Eastern Europe, and were forced to speak English with each other. Irina was tall and malicious and meant her comments, and Rusalka, a redhead who looked like a curvy peppermint stick, parroted everything she heard. Beyond their contrasting appearances—sulky and dark, bright and sunny—they were alike in being resolutely shallow, with no thought beyond a new man in the lobby, dress, the police chief’s bad marriage. They talked about the guests, though Dulcy was never fernlike enough to catch them talking about her. The accountant in Room 204 might be an axe murderer (Irina, disputed by Rusalka); one man long absent from Room 423 (Dulcy, below him in 323, paid attention to this) might have managed to kill himself in Butte or Helena or even further afar; the colorless Leonora Randall in 326, another lobby stalwart, received monthly wired payments from New York and was either in the process of being jilted or fleeing a violent suitor. Miss Randall’s lips were thin and chapped, her eyes flat, and her papery sobs itched their way through Dulcy’s west wall. They had tea together one day, but Miss Randall didn’t volunteer tragedy; she talked quite a bit about nothing: dresses, stationery, and Very Nice People in town.

  Dulcy was interested in ruin and duplicity, and she sorted people in her own way: the dishonest (Irina, for example, and the unfaithful police chief Gerry Fenoways, a bullheaded drunk who always seemed to be whispering in the ear of Eugenia Knox, who was his aunt), the mental wrecks (Leonora Randall, young Rex Woolley on a bad day, a man wearing armor who’d stood in the street and screamed about God until Gerry Fenoways bundled him off), and refugees like Samuel Peake and the German photographer, Siegfried Durr.

  Dulcy understood that she currently fit in all three of these categories, but she aimed for the last group; they seemed to keep secrets well. No one knew what to whisper about Durr, a Berliner with stiff dark hair and wild blue eyes, a bad limp, and an elegant ebony-and-silver cane. He kept a military bearing, and Dulcy watched Gerry Fenoways size him up and stay away. Dulcy did the same with Fenoways, who was theoretically handsome, meeting his eyes over a newspaper: they dismissed each other. He strutted on thick, too-short legs and brayed, and might as well have been another species.

  According to Eugenia Knox, who had purchased the hotel two years earlier, Samuel Peake had come to Montana for his health, like half the town: sufferers of asthma, or tuberculosis, or the pressures of city living. One day he sat next to Dulcy in the lobby, and after a diffident conversation about her past and her reading, he asked: “My condolences, but do you need to be in absolute mourning, if no one here knew your husband? Are you still in the mood to mourn, or has grief begun to come and go?”

  It took her a moment: “Some days are difficult.”

  “Well, hide on those and go out on others. Life is short.”

  This wasn’t the tenor she was looking for: she needed a buffer of tragedy, time to get her past in place. But she couldn’t manage outrage, and she was bored, and they started having lunch together. Samuel Peake explained the town in a roundabout way, confirming most of the impressions she’d made and dissolving mysteries about men who might have been interesting: this one beat his wife, another owed
more than he owned, a third was dull beyond all imagining. Gerry Fenoways and his brother preyed on female inmates, Peake’s assistant Rex Woolley needed to escape his mother, Siegfried Durr was talented but drank more than most, in a town that drank more than most. It was good Dulcy felt widowy, said Samuel Peake, because her options were limited.

  He was funny, and sweet, and he did not pry or suggest he was an option. When they talked, when they looked at people together, she began to feel giddy again: the world was rich, and interesting, and survivable. Eugenia Knox tried harder for information, foisting tea and cakes on the widow, sliding a chair close. She seemed to be built out of joined pillows like a Rubens rag doll, not obese but nowhere bony, with a general look of placid exhaustion. She moved ceaselessly but sedately around her empire, scooping surfaces clean as if her languorous arms were magic wands. Her questions seemed equally idle, and as she answered as vaguely as possible, Dulcy fell into Mrs. Nash, and ironed out the story she worked to believe: her husband, Edgar, had been tragic and flawed and lovely, though she left a sense of a dark side. He had volunteered in New York at the beginning of the war but had quickly fallen sick and seen little action, and had never fully recovered. Dulcy implied that his relatives were wealthy and distant.

  You’d have to be an ass to insist on details, and Mrs. Knox would float off toward another dusty surface or difficult guest. But a few days later she invited Dulcy to her apartment for tea, and she surprised her with other guests: a widow named Margaret Mallow; the watery Leonora Randall, who kept the rooms across the hall from Dulcy; and Vinca Macalester, the doctor’s wife. Eugenia Knox’s quarters were as padded as their owner: festoons of velvet flanked doorways and windows, and the floors were so laden with carpets that walking through the parlor felt like crossing a sandy beach. Dulcy arrived on a bright, snow-blasted afternoon and felt like she’d opened the door to a séance. She made for the crack of light near a window, next to Margaret Mallow, who gave her a reassuring, sidelong look. Vinca Macalester nattered away, and Leonora Randall agreed with everything anyone said. They talked about the weather, about Mrs. Knox’s prospective new chef, about Rex Woolley’s business prospects, and about Crime (some murmurs from Mrs. Macalester, whose husband had just mended a man who’d been shot at a “seamstress’s” house on B Street).