The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  She wanted it all, despite the neighbor. When she walked into the Elite lobby, Samuel Peake was waiting for Irina to finish with a guest. “You look happy,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Dulcy.

  “Just that. No need to be alarmed.” He handed a note to Irina. “Don’t read that,” he said. “It’s for Lewis. Rise above your nature, just this once.”

  •••

  Samuel talked her into joining him again at dinner with Margaret Mallow and Rex Woolley, and they all drank too much. Rex talked about investment ideas—dams, resorts—and Samuel worked to keep bringing him back to newspapers. Gerry Fenoways, the police chief, was in the far corner with his wife, who looked like a nominally healthier version of his mother. They didn’t seem to be talking: Gerry’s face was red, and his wife’s was rigid. Eugenia swept into the room, ushering in a group of fur-coated travelers, and Samuel crooked his finger. “Eugenia,” he whispered, “perhaps you could go over and reassure Mrs. Fenoways that Gerry loves her, and loves her alone.”

  Eugenia turned a roasted pink, but instead of fleeing she began going from table to table, filling glasses herself, floating around the periphery of the room like a swollen butterfly.

  That night, Dulcy woke to the sound of a man howling in the halls and a woman shushing him, and she felt the hotel shudder. A rumble, a shift: Dulcy listened for a train, but there wasn’t one; she watched the ceiling, but it didn’t fall on her face. Here she was in a brick hotel during an earthquake again—why did this always happen? It happened because she only slept in hotels.

  In the morning when she left her room, Irving and Rusalka said they hadn’t felt a thing, but Dulcy guessed that everything felt like a passing train to them, now. They were scrubbing the hallway near Eugenia’s private apartment; Chief Fenoways had urinated up and down its length. “Until she let him in,” whispered Irving.

  Dulcy slid her way to the office of the property agent whose name had been posted on the fence of the house on Eighth Street, a man named Nesser. She’d seen him eating in the Elite dining room. His face was bland, but she’d been impressed by the wine on his table, and now she also approved of the way he didn’t stare at her mud-splattered coat or her windblown hair, or question her taste in houses. But when Dulcy said she didn’t need to see the inside before putting in an offer, he pulled on his hat and coat and signaled his assistant to bring a car, one of the only ones she’d seen in town. “I won’t take advantage of a widow,” he said.

  The widow cringed as a crowd gathered to watch the assistant tinker with the Reo engine, but they spun through the mud, and she found the house was solid, built in 1885 and plumbed and electrified later by a junior banker with a finicky wife. It had fir trim and floors, tall windows and a bathroom with a tub and water closet and sink. The kitchen had a tin counter, a hole in the floor for draining an icebox into the cellar, and a stove space under a large vent, which warbled, in the wind. The two bedrooms upstairs were wallpapered in a pattern of lumpen indigo grapes. The banker’s wife hadn’t liked light anymore than she’d liked snow, and the couple had lacked children, and so the sunniest room had been used for storage, while the owners had used the dark room that faced north, and the neighbor currently stared at Dulcy and the realtor from his front porch. When the realtor waved, the man walked into his house and slammed the door. “I don’t mind not being social,” she said.

  “He’s a minister,” said the realtor. “He can’t be that bad.”

  A realtor had to be an optimist. Dulcy thought the neighbor could be that bad, but she still made an offer. They discussed bank transfers, workmen, and weather while she worried about money and whether she’d lost her hold on her circumstances.

  •••

  The Widow Nash perked up and continued her social hatch: Margaret talked her into a meeting of the Sacajawea Club at the Albemarle Hotel, where Frances Woolley, Rex’s mother, was hosting a meal. Mrs. Woolley usually waited to come north from Pasadena until spring, but here she was, eager to slum with the hoi polloi. Who were naturally happy to slum with her, even Eugenia, who was miffed by the choice of the Albemarle instead of the Elite.

  Frances Woolley, mother of Rex and aunt and benefactor to Samuel Peake, was tall, with a long neck and a cloud of what Eugenia Knox called “auburn ” hair (Dulcy noted that the same color was described as red on a maid like Rusalka). She was still handsome, with an eye-popping figure, and Margaret said that she was fond of her chauffeur, and that a contingent of men would follow her through the summer season. Frances made Dulcy think of a bored carnivore in a zoo, but she talked intelligently about books, and she’d drummed good wine out of the Albemarle basement, and she worried about Rex quite openly.

  The problem with Rex: every idea had to be his, and new. Established good ideas—say, the newspaper business with his cousin (poor Samuel was so patient), or real estate in boomtowns like Los Angeles—didn’t hold his attention. He schemed about water and dams, highways and hospitals; he wanted to run the world without knowing how it worked, and his mother had sent him to spend time with Samuel in Montana because Rex had bought some land in the Sierras—water, again—and his partners were being sued.

  “Boys will be silly,” said smug Mrs. Whittlesby.

  “Boys will be stupid,” said Eugenia Knox.

  It was one thing for Mrs. Woolley to complain, and another for anyone to agree. Dulcy didn’t think Rex was stupid, but this was a difficult compliment to bestow. The topic turned to the doom of both Mrs. Fenoways, the elder with a tumor breaking through the skin of her breast, the younger running from her marriage. Gerry’s wife had decided to visit family back East: the police chief was on a tear, a jag, a roll, a sodden Sherman’s march through town in premature reaction to his mother’s impending death or his imploding marriage. He’d broken a man’s leg the night before; he especially disliked wife-beaters, and one of the older women whispered that the Fenoways brothers had locked the door as teenagers and allowed their own abusive father to freeze to death.

  “Gerald is a fine man and a loving son,” said Eugenia Knox. Her face was stiff, and she’d lost her soft pink look. “His brother is another matter. When Errol was ill, who came down to help us? Gerald, of course, the best nephew a man could have. He helped us in our time of need, and now, when he will be so alone, I will help him.”

  It was a wide world in terms of nephews, thought Dulcy during the ensuing silence. “Well, of course you will,” said Mrs. Ganter. “And how is Mr. Knox?”

  On the far side of Eugenia, Margaret was grinning. She didn’t mince around half-understood undercurrents with Dulcy; she’d told her that Livingston was crammed with ancient vicious southerners trying for their own kingdoms—Baptists and know-nothings, bigots and thieves—but many of the women had a lively, silly eye. They argued about novels, and ethnicities, and dogs: Vinca Macalester liked her dogs symmetrical; Abigail Tate liked random spots. Mrs. Ganter drove the polite women wild by mentioning Mr. Thompson’s long legs and Mr. Nesser’s large hands.

  Maria Nash tried to pry out other people’s stories, but everyone always wanted to know about her dead man, and Dulcy had already ruined him: Edgar Nash had come into increasingly bland definition as an amalgamation (an amalgam? Dulcy had a bad habit of thinking in mining terms) of Walton and Victor’s least memorable traits, which meant he was mostly Victor. She hadn’t caught the tangent until the damage was done: Edgar had been well traveled but finicky, with difficult, wealthy parents. The shift from the dashing wounded man she’d imagined on the train was upsetting. She wished she’d stuck closer to Maximillian Cope’s novel and made him a drunken adventurer, a talented wastrel, but when the concerned women of Livingston faced her, refreshments tilting as they concentrated on her words, she’d only managed to solidify the bore: Edgar had been an opera buff and talented businessman, a fair shot and a good though reluctant soldier.

  Dulcy had to survive these
women; she had to make them believe her. Tonight, after too much wine, new details of the sad story of Edgar dripped out: he’d had malaria in Cuba, but he’d made an ill-considered return to service in the Philippines, where he’d had a close call with guerillas. On a visit to family in Cornwall, he’d fallen ill with pneumonia. He never fully recovered, and he’d ultimately died in California, of meningitis.

  “Such awful luck!” said Margaret. “Nothing interesting ever happened to Frank.”

  “Edgar had a rough time,” said Dulcy. “He was very brave, but one thing led to another.”

  “His war experience sounds close to Mr. Braudel’s,” said Vinca. “Our first library speaker.”

  Over dessert, with more sherry, Dulcy’s mind slid away from Vinca’s ominous comment. The crumb of the cake oozed butter, and the sugar icing smelled sharply of bourbon; Dulcy and Margaret planned a shopping trip to Butte. By the time the meeting broke up—with nothing substantive discussed beyond Easter baskets for the Poor Farm and whether bridge whist was worth learning—it was ten o’ clock, and as Dulcy sank into the mud on her way back to the Elite, she thought the clay might give her a better chance to stay upright. Fat flakes of snow spun around her head. There were still Masons and Elks and Woodsmen of the World about—on Thursday nights, every fraternal club seemed to have a meeting—most of them heckling a drunk who sang in a piercing, marginal tenor:

  The wind it did blow high and it did blow low

  and it waved their petticoats to and fro...

  The song was a Walton favorite. She smiled before she remembered she was wearing black.

  He tapped at the bush and the bird it did fly in

  just a little above her lily-white knee...

  She was crossing the street when the drunk changed his tone: “Here now, what the fuck do the two of you have in mind? Stop that shit!” A screaming bald man had rounded the corner of Second and Park at an awkward run, and another middle-aged man was chasing him, both of them sliding in the mud in a circle around the drunken singer. The second man had a long knife.

  “You’re a fucking savage,” screamed the singer.

  “I’ll gut you both!” No one in the crowd stepped forward. The bald man ran in circles in the mud, sliding and backtracking; the man with the knife lunged and then lunged again.

  They’re not serious, she thought, scurrying for the hotel. Things like this probably happened all the time here—police pissing in halls, men in cages in the streets. She was tugging the door shut behind her when the bald man lunged through. Irving ran forward to slam it closed on the face of the man with the knife.

  The glass door shattered; the pursuer recoiled, as did Irving in the opposite direction. Dulcy was intent on the stairs, but the bald man tottered toward her. She was about to say now you’re safe —though the man with the knife was already trying to rise—when she saw blood spilling out from under the bald man’s vest, splattering his fine shoes. He slowly lifted his shirt, and they both looked at the puncture in his stomach. It sucked and flowed with his breathing.

  “Lie down,” said Dulcy, and the man did, dropping to his knees and then onto his back in his own puddle. She crouched down and tried to straighten out his legs. His hands fluttered, and he fixed his eyes on the far wall. The man with the knife struggled to his feet, some of the hotel’s glass door in his forehead, but the drunk who’d been singing “The Bird in the Bush ” reappeared and clubbed him with the hotel’s iron doorstop, and the crowd roared. Still on the floor, Dulcy looked back down at the man who’d been knifed, whose bleeding and breathing had stopped along with the piano music in the tavern.

  The lobby blurred with faces. She wiped her bloody hands on his waistcoat and let herself be pushed out of the way. At the stairs she heard a bellow, and she turned to the arrival of Gerry Fenoways of the perpetually dying mother, now complaining that he was being taken from her bedside. He had an actorly habit of turning his entire body toward each person he addressed, and now he was calling for witnesses , witnesses , tilting from side to side like a weighted balloon while his young deputy, a pale boy named Bixby, cringed in embarrassment.

  Dulcy met Irving’s eyes, shook her head, and ran upstairs.

  •••

  The bald man was dead, and her hands weren’t shaking, but Martha still would have called her juddery; she would have told Dulcy to get a grip, find her brain .

  Martha had never had to see someone stabbed to death. Dulcy didn’t know if she’d have dreams, but now she thought again about what Walton might have seen falling, Pip and God’s loom, faces and beds looking out at him as he passed the Butler windows, the sound and touch of the sea air fanning his nightshirt and poor sore body before he hit.

  She yanked her mind free: there would be a trial, and she would have to testify, and someone would take her photograph, and Henning would see her face as he scanned the national papers, selecting Victor’s reading for the day. She rinsed the snaky splatters of blood off her hands, then her coat, before she gave up, tossed everything on the floor, stripped naked and scrubbed herself, found a nightgown and ran to the window.

  The police cart had arrived, lanterns swinging, beautiful blurs of light. “Dead as a fucking doornail!” bellowed Fenoways. “Bixby, where’s my brother? Find Hubie, and a stretcher, and tell Eugenia to donate a blanket for a fucking cause.” A lull, and then she watched Bixby and Hubie move the drained body, lumpy but insubstantial under a tablecloth, through the fat drops of snow. She heard hammering and guessed Irving was covering the shattered door with wood. The snow began to fall even harder, wet and large, and a new train was so muffled by the down in the air that she couldn’t tell if it approached from the west or the east. She curled up on the bed as the sound of brakes drowned out the Fenoways brothers’ bellows, and she tried to put her mind somewhere else: wading in Chautauqua Creek, the way the courtyard rippled in Salonica, the spice bazaars in Damascus or Palermo or anything that smelled different than Walton or the stabbed man when they reached the ground.

  The sounds of voices, bystanders or new guests from this last train, died down. She would read and fall asleep with her light on like an idiot. And now that she wanted her glasses, she finally realized that she didn’t have her bag, that it hadn’t made it up the stairs. She’d dropped it on the floor when she’d knelt with the man.

  She looked for her slippers and gave up, cinched her robe, and padded to the stairwell. Behind her, Miss Randall purred and mumbled, oblivious to death and chaos; below, Irving was talking fast and hacking his little heart out. She tried to wait him out, but her feet were freezing, and now Irving was laughing, probably because he’d just seen someone die, and people had bought him drinks when he had no head for liquor. The stairwell lights were dimmed, which meant he thought his guests were in for the night. She started down, but paused when she heard steps on the marble.

  “Night then, Irv,” said a man. “I hope tomorrow is quieter. Did Samuel see the show?”

  “He’s off to Helena,” said Irving. “Missed it. Did I give you the mail?”

  “You did.”

  Dulcy decided that she would soon freeze to death, and that anyone on a first-name basis with Irving wouldn’t care about Mrs. Nash. She edged to the side when she rounded the landing to make way for the man climbing toward her. His head was down and he was still wearing a hat; he didn’t notice her until they were a few steps apart. He lifted his head, and she focused on his pale, surprised face for a second before she took in the hand with the missing fingers on the banister. They stared at each other before the man from the train moved to one side and she edged past.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Miss...? Excuse me, but I’ve forgotten your name.”

  It was so hard to speak. “Mrs. Nash,” she said. “I’m sure we’ve met, but I can’t recall yours, either.”

  “Lewis Braudel,” he said. “Irving just told me the story of you
r dramatic evening.”

  “Horrible,” said Dulcy.

  Lewis Braudel looked down and away from her bare feet. “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night,” said Dulcy, despite the fact that it hadn’t been, and her heart was blowing up. She tottered past him, and felt him pause on the next landing to look back.

  Irving was humming as he mopped blood from the lobby floor. He nodded toward her blue bag on top of the glass case at the base of the stairs, the one that held little tourist trinkets, statuettes of geysers and bears and Indian chiefs. “I just saw it,” he said. “About to bring it up, but I worried I’d wake you.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” said Dulcy. “That poor man. Do you know his name?”

  “Well, of course,” said Irving cheerfully. “The lawyer Peck, and Mr. Inkster, who owns the stables. But we can’t have blood on the marble, even if we liked the person it came from. I’m a happy man that Mrs. K slept through the thing.”

  Dulcy doubted Mrs. Knox’s slumber was natural, but she envied her. She’d be taking the next train, rather than sleeping at all. The reality of the man on the stairs was sinking in: she could hear his voice on the Empire Builder, see the hat on his lap, the smile from the platform in Bozeman. He had been Victor’s man after all—she’d been found, and she must run. East, west; how much time did she have, and how to ask Irving when either train came through? “I’d rather no one know I saw it happen,” she said. “I’d rather not have my name in the paper.”

  “Course not.”