The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

Her whole body was shuddering. “But the new guest knew. I was so startled to see him on the stairs.”

  Irving looked dubious. “Well, you’re a mess tonight, Mrs. Nash. There’s nothing to worry about. That’s just Mr. Braudel finally back, the guest I’ve been worried about. I only told him you helped.”

  “Oh,” said Dulcy. “I don’t think so. I’m thinking of a man with missing fingers.”

  “Well, yes, but it wasn’t that he lost them playing with a knife. He’s Mr. Peake’s old school friend, the one who’s kept 423 this last year,” said Irving, looking her over. “You have blood on your chin, you know. Can I bring you up something to calm you down?”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  He started to hack again as she retreated, wondering why she hadn’t said yes. She wiped off the smear on her jaw and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She could hear someone walking in the room directly above for the first time. Old school friend : even her gothic mind couldn’t believe someone would have shadowed her on the train from Seattle, only to have her choose a town where he’d lived for months. She hadn’t known where she would get off the train, or whether she’d have the courage to leave at all. The leaving was one of the things that still stunned her every night.

  Irina’s strong, fast steps rumbled up the stairs, then passed to the hall above Dulcy’s patch of ceiling. The man moved to his door and spoke, and the notes of Irina’s voice rose. The door slammed, and Dulcy heard Irina’s quick retreat. Lewis Braudel’s window scraped open, and a moment later cigarette smoke winnowed through Dulcy’s own window, still ajar.

  Mr. Maslingen, barricaded in his Butler castle, is rumored to have received a suicide note from Miss Remfrey, posted in Spokane. The Remfreys, wishing to end this sad chapter, have expressed frustration at not being allowed to read their sister’s last words.

  —The Seattle General, March 1, 1905

  chapter 12

  Women of the World

  •

  Dulcy spent most of the morning after the stabbing flat on her back in bed, listening to her ceiling. Twice she left the bed to watch Lewis Braudel cross the street and disappear east, a third time in the company of a laughing Samuel Peake. Between these sightings, she never saw Braudel return to the hotel, and his pacing always caught her by surprise. He liked a counterclockwise pattern.

  She didn’t know whether to stay or run.

  Irving brought her coffee, but his jabber cleared nothing up. Between crime communiqués—the dead man had a pretty wife, and the killer had loved the pretty wife—Dulcy learned that the man from the train was from New York—a state Irving had left as a toddler, whose population and variety he could not parse—and that people paid him to write. Mr. Braudel liked women, but he was fairly discrete; he liked to drink but not to wretched excess. He had been in and out of the hotel for the last two years, since Samuel had moved to town, and he had otherwise traveled, and was often ill. Irving enjoyed Braudel tremendously and had been worried by the length of his last absence. As he said, over and over, without helpful details, when he delivered the day’s gore-laden newspaper.

  “He travels for business? What sort of business? To Seattle, or San Francisco?”

  “He travels for the sake of writing about things.”

  “What kind of writing?”

  Irving, who could not read well, looked annoyed. “Newspapers for sure, but a book, too.”

  Dulcy was supposed to meet Margaret, but she sent word that she was ill. When Margaret came by, openly admitting curiosity about the knifing rather than concern about Dulcy’s health, Dulcy took a roundabout approach: why was Irving so worried about a Mr. Braudel?

  Margaret was friendly with Samuel Peake, and she knew quite a bit about Lewis Braudel. Samuel and Braudel had gone to Columbia together, and Samuel said Braudel had caught malaria during the Spanish War; this explained much of Irving’s worry. There was a rumor—a flutter among the local women—that he’d been with the Astor Battery, the Ivy League crew of young heirs who’d volunteered to fight in Cuba, but Samuel had laughed at the gossips, and said that Braudel wasn’t quite an heir, and that after he’d fallen sick he’d simply stayed on in the Philippines as a reporter.

  “Ah,” said Dulcy. “But why be here?”

  Margaret stood at the window, watching the flash through the studio roof as Siegfried Durr worked. “Well, why not, Maria? He’s visited Samuel often, and he’s written quite a bit about Butte, Clark and all, and I’ve heard he’s having an affair with a woman in Bozeman. It doesn’t matter where he is between assignments, and now he writes his own books. He fashions himself lazy, but he’s been too many places for that to be true. He wrote his novel under a pseudonym, which just makes it all fun instead of tragedy. It’s very, very racy, and so he only wants me to tell the ladies about the journalism when he speaks to the club. But it certainly makes him more interesting, and you’re a woman of the world—you’ll love it, if you aren’t offended.”

  Some sarcasm: Margaret had begun to sense that Dulcy’s sensibilities weren’t fragile. It was only now that Dulcy realized that Braudel had written the book she’d read in Denver, the false memoir by one Maximillian Cope, that she’d used for so much of the late, great Edgar’s experience. She finally looked convincingly ill.

  Margaret left for crackers and bicarbonate, and Dulcy went back to her study of the ceiling and Lewis Braudel’s footsteps. She could stay or she could flee for a new place—the Midwest, the South, California, Europe. Some days she felt as if she knew no one on earth, and on others she counted all the people she might see on a new sidewalk, who might remember her from a dinner in Manhattan, a Buffalo wedding, a clinic in Minneapolis, a bank; all the people she’d forgotten to Walton, Victor, a glass of wine, time. If she couldn’t remember their faces, how could they remember hers? How could this matter?

  But this missed the point. He had remembered, at least something. He didn’t need to have followed her to recognize her, depending on what he remembered from the train, depending on whether he’d read the news about Leda Remfrey and put the two women together. In the middle of the night, he’d roll over, and open his eyes, and understand.

  Perhaps she could pay him off. Perhaps she’d leave and come back after he’d died of malaria or worked his way through the women in town.

  She stayed inside for the rest of the day, ordering her meals up. Samuel visited, having heard she was ill. He brought his favorite brand of stomach pills (“Take two or three. Did you eat something blue?”) and a deluge of useless information: Lawrence Peck and Albert Inkster had both loved Mrs. Peck, who has not been seen since the day of the attack, and had probably bolted for family in San Francisco. Samuel was hysterical with disappointment: finally a violent sex scandal but the guilty man was obvious. There’d be no prolonged trial, no secrets, no news. It was a tremendous waste of murder.

  When he bounced out her door, she listened to him climb the stairs to Braudel’s room, and then she listened to them laugh for much of the next hour. It enraged her. Nothing in her life was funny at all.

  The next morning, after she heard Braudel head down the stairs and watched from the window as he crossed the street—moving quickly, like a well man—she emerged, and none of the lobby regulars stared at her as if she were a rediscovered confidence woman. A train was pulling in, and she hurried down the block, through the soapy steam from Joe Wong’s laundry, worried by whatever ghosts might disembark.

  It was March 2, the day before Inauguration Day, and parties would begin early, even in Livingston. The Boys were political animals, and Dulcy imagined them in Washington, rebuilding the family reputation at the balls, publically applauding Roosevelt, whispering to fellow bankers. They were not progressive men, and they never told acquaintances that their father had been a miner.

  At the library, she found Lewis Braudel all over the place: Harper’s a
nd the Century, McClure’s and Collier’s. Politics; some cruel profiles; talk of the West as a colony, no better or worse than Algeria, India, or King Leopold’s Congo; an amusing piece contrasting insanity diagnoses in a rich Scottish immigrant and a poor Irish one; some non-patronizing humor in a profile of female explorers; an essay on Italian restaurants that made her like him too much. She’d read some of these articles without recognizing his name, especially a humor piece called “The Grand Tour of Health,” which might have been a profile of Walton. She tried to settle on an opinion, beyond the notion that he wrote well but used too many adverbs. He was a bit of a socialist, though one who seemed fond of certain luxuries. He was not bland.

  In the Enterprise, to the right of enormous losses around mukden, she skimmed the news of the stabbing, then landed on a second article:

  Identity of Girl Still Unknown

  The body of a girl discovered along the train tracks west of our city remains unclaimed. The corpse had been sent north to Great Falls, to be viewed by a family seeking a missing daughter, but these hopes were dashed last week. Her presence has now been requested in Billings; we wonder how much longer she can tour. She is described as being between the ages of twenty and thirty, of medium height and weight, with dark brown hair. Mr. Siegfried Durr, at 117 North Main, has photographs available for viewing, if any citizen feels they might recognize the girl. The pictures have been artfully framed to spare the viewer’s sensibilities.

  If the girl is not identified, the body will proceed to the Poor Farm cemetery.

  Buck up, thought Dulcy. You’re not dead. And she realized, finally, that she was no longer willing to be dead to disappear, even in the middle of the night, even if Victor was close to knowing where she hid.

  Back at the hotel, Irina waved a note: Mrs. Nash’s house offer had been accepted.

  •••

  Margaret and Dulcy left for Butte the next morning. Margaret thought it would be the best place to go to find things for the house, and Dulcy, intent on avoidance, said that sooner would be better. Margaret’s own house was a tiny brick kitty-corner to the library, with not enough yard—her husband had not cared for the outdoors. The idea that Margaret might want another husband was not a given: according to the Sacajaweas, Mr. Mallow had been a sandy-haired seller of encyclopedias who had lacked curiosity about the text of the books he sold. Dulcy hadn’t sensed heartbreak. Margaret said she was waiting out a year of mourning before regaining a teaching job that fall. She was snub-nosed and long-waisted, but she had beautiful dark hair and eyes, and she was so good-humored, so intelligent and empathetic, that Dulcy watched men watch her with openhearted admiration. Margaret was a good woman; Margaret was a funny smart sweetheart.

  Butte was a short jog rather than a full retreat, just enough to make the situation bearable. Margaret and Dulcy dropped their bags at the Thornton and shopped for linens and cookware at Hennessey’s, a store whose name Livingston people whispered with the sort of reverence Dulcy had heard used for Liberty’s or Altman’s. They found rugs from a dealer who looked like he’d been born in Persia, and ordered teak blinds. Mrs. Knox had supplied the name of a furniture dealer who stocked the better leavings of people who’d sold quickly—half of Montana, at one point or another—and they found a secretaire with actual secret drawers, two nice sets of pawned silver, and some pretty Brussels lace draperies. They bought clothes, not all widowy: nightgowns, dresses in blue and mauve, summer skirts, white hats, canvas aprons for cleaning and gardening. Margaret never asked why Dulcy hadn’t sent for the belongings she’d presumably accumulated during her marriage.

  Margaret went back to the Thornton to rest before dinner, and Dulcy set off on her main errand. No one else had the key to this bank box, but she worried that Henning might somehow know about the account, that he’d pulled the brown book from under Walton’s pillow, too. Coming here for a pittance might reveal her existence, but she had to try: she had enough money to stay in Montana, not enough if she ever had to flee again. At the bank the manager was faultlessly polite, and politely disinterested, as he had her sign the log that showed no visits since 1900, before the African mines. She wrote Miranda Falk—if Henning followed her, and paid the manager to show him the log, at least she could leave a clue that she’d expected him—and waited for the manager to leave her alone with the box.

  She kept him waiting for a full ten minutes while comprehending the forty-three thousand dollars in English and American notes, with some Austrian gold for good measure. Walton had loved hiding things, and now he’d allowed her to hide. She’d hoped for a quarter of this, and outside on the street with a full satchel, she walked slowly, mind veering around theories of how Walton might have collected so much. This wasn’t a revenge on Victor; the dates were wrong. Had he cheated other clients, or spent less than she’d ever imagined on women? She tried looking at a stand of narcissus, a candy store, a window full of fabric, but she shriveled a little as she passed the Sons of St. George Hall on North Main and listened for Cornish ghosts, mining voices. She took the side entrance to the Thornton.

  “Was your business all right, Maria?” asked Margaret, looking up from her book.

  “It was all right,” said Dulcy.

  “You’re sad,” said Margaret.

  They had shellfish and caviar, wine and brandy, and Dulcy’s worry eroded again. Afterward, they smoked cigarettes and drank champagne above the people strolling down East Broadway: bankers and prostitutes, blacks and Chinese. All of them were well-dressed city people, not a cowboy in sight.

  “Maybe the men are more interesting here,” said Margaret.

  Dulcy scanned the sidewalk, and didn’t think so, and didn’t think Margaret meant it, either.

  When they arrived at the station the next morning, Margaret felt woozy and retreated to the bathroom. Dulcy bought a pasty on the platform and ate it hot there and then before she climbed into the first-class cabin and pretended to be a proper lady, lacking appetite.

  •••

  She paid for the house with a portion of the cash and deposited the rest, rattling on to the man at the bank about the need to keep an extra thousand for furnishings and repairs. She wasn’t sure if he hated or envied her or both, but she had her first sense, watching the black-suited men eye her in the bank lobby, of what it meant to be a young widow. She tucked some cash into the satchel in her room, but she rethought hiding places—Irina searched well and constantly. Fluttery bits of paper Dulcy had left in the closet door and the bureau drawers were dislodged when she checked, and though she was sure the barricaded pile with the journals hadn’t been touched, she added another layer, with a note midway:

  If you read this, Irina, then I know you’re in my things. I am private, and I am not worth your time.

  The moth wing on the green journal at the top of the pile stayed in place, but she moved the cash and diamond to the hem of the gray shearling coat, and tied intricate knots with silk ribbons around the satchel and each of the notebooks inside.

  She was back at the window, back to watching Lewis Braudel come and go. She didn’t know what to do, what to worry about, how to react to his presence or his apparent disinterest. She fretted about the talk he was scheduled to give the club, but tried to believe in the idea that everything in life really was coincidence: she wasn’t living in Walton’s world, anymore.

  Dulcy resorted again to a corner of the library, Braudel having destroyed the refuge of the Elite lobby. She read every magazine, and tracked the misfortunes of the world and the statewide travels of her doppelganger body, who was due to visit Livingston in the next few days. She’d gradually worked through most of the titles on its half-dozen shiny shelves, and today she ended up with a fat volume on Chinese customs. She hoped to find an answer to how long the town’s Chinese restaurant would be shuttered. There was a sign on the door of Ah Loy—closed for a funeral—and Eugenia, enemy of all good food, had claime
d that the owners of the restaurant had gone all the way back to China with their body. Margaret said nonsense—families immigrated with a little bit of soil, and would tuck it in the cemetery up Fleshman Creek.

  A shadow fell across the page. “Was your husband Chinese?” asked Samuel.

  She laughed and blushed, and when she saw Braudel standing next to Samuel, she faded to a mottled white. But she managed, “How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you,” Samuel said. “My friend is at loose ends, and needed something to write about, and I suggested he had his choice of horrible things from the last few months’ papers. A perfect sport for March. Have you met Lewis Braudel? Lewis, this is the shy Mrs. Nash.”

  “We have,” said Braudel, tipping his head. “The night of the stabbing. And before, I think, but I may be wrong. Were we on train, when we met?”

  “I can’t remember,” said Dulcy. “I’ve certainly taken enough of them in the last few months.”

  “You had a sister.”

  “A friend, helping after my husband died.”

  “Ah.” He looked confused.

  “Maybe it would be easier to look at it from the other point of view,” said Dulcy. “I went from Seattle to Chicago with my friend in January. What were you writing about then?”

  She was proud of herself: she’d lied with near panache, though her hands shook, and she felt wet under her arms, and anyone who knew her would have heard the squeak in her voice. But no one knew her.

  “You may have remembered my hand,” said Braudel. “I would have remembered your face.”

  “He’s like that,” said Samuel. “A flirt. So what shall we look for? Suicidal businessmen, girls who jump out of train windows, girls who lie on the tracks?”

  “I don’t want to write about dead people,” said Lewis Braudel. “You’re in the mood—you write about them.” He met Dulcy’s eyes. “What should I write about?”