The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

“Live people,” she said. Her voice creaked.

  “You’ll be at the talk tonight?”

  Dulcy had intended to plead illness or sadness or some other dread ness to avoid this Sacajawea Club event. She wasn’t proficient with excuses; Walton had been such a good one for a decade. “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “You should come,” said Lewis. “You can be my heckler, so that we have no deadly silences.”

  •••

  Frances Woolley had made money on California land, and she had the largest house in town, an ugly paste-colored pile of bricks at the corner of Yellowstone and Clark. Her parties were filled with cosmopolitan flourishes: Japanese lanterns and cocktails, the novelty of a long-playing phonograph, a lack of ruffly elements in architecture or clothing or behavior. Mrs. Woolley traveled with three servants: an English housekeeper, a French lady’s maid, and a gaunt man named Simms who handled Mrs. Woolley’s accounts and drove her automobile, this year a cream Hammer Tonneau with red seats which would remain in the carriage house until the snow stayed away. Dulcy had spent a portion of her life in houses where a housemaid could spend an hour a day dusting aspidistras, and after listening to Samuel, she could guess at Mrs. Woolley’s relatives—a distant cousin who had gone to university with Victor, an aunt who had a middling house on Union Square. Dulcy knew that Mrs. Woolley was a medium-sized fish enjoying a small pond.

  Still, she made the pond comfortable. Rex Woolley offered drinks with gin and currant syrup, whiskey and rhubarb syrup, rum and lemonade—the Woolley pantry was a sticky place. Dulcy asked for a rye old-fashioned and tried not to guzzle. Mrs. Woolley claimed she hadn’t seen Lewis for ten years, since he and Samuel were at Columbia and Rex was still in shorts. She petted his arm. “I was here most of last year,” Lewis said mildly. “Just away in the summer.”

  “And it was the only season I felt brave enough to try. But this year I was much bolder.”

  She looked like she’d suck him off the top of a drink, like the fizz on her good champagne. Her cloud of hair tilted toward him. She asked Durr to take their photograph.

  “Mother collects trophies,” said Rex. He was not quite as bland and fretful as he seemed; maybe it was a family trait, because Samuel also changed to suit an audience: with the town’s pillars, he was flat, earnest, admiring; with women, he teased. But now she understood why Samuel called Rex the Kinglet: as he mixed drinks, she heard him telling the people at that end of the room that his family tree traced back to William the Conqueror.

  “Rex’s having a mood,” Samuel told Lewis. “He negotiated to buy a touring company in Yellowstone Park without telling us. Carriages and tents and guides. He’s arranged for Grover Dewberry to visit and film a trip down. He wants to rent a train car and take the town.”

  “That’s an idiotic idea,” said Lewis Braudel. “He’ll have competitors who know what they’re doing. Why doesn’t he just write for your paper? Why don’t you give him a little air?”

  They argued about Samuel’s selfishness, and the man named Dewberry who would visit soon, the things Lewis might read in a few minutes, more things Samuel thought he should write about. It was the first time Dulcy had been able to study Lewis Braudel since the train, and she glanced and looked away, glanced and looked away, until she worried people might think she had a tic. He looked healthier now than he had back in January. She noticed that he had a pattern of tiny blue metallic specks on his left cheekbone.

  He turned and caught her. “I did not stab myself repeatedly with a pencil.”

  Samuel kept on: “Why not write about Siegfried?”

  “Because he’s my friend. Because I don’t want to shit on my own sidewalk. Because everyone should be able start over ten times.”

  “Why would you write about Mr. Durr?” asked Margaret.

  Durr was readying his camera on the far side of the room, using his cane to position a banker who struggled to hold both a cocktail and Mrs. Woolley. “There you go,” said Lewis. “My point exactly. What do you see? An alcoholic Prussian, right?”

  Possibly, thought Dulcy, but Margaret looked like she would knife him.

  “And I see someone who’s survived more than any of us could imagine,” said Lewis. “Did you know he was in China?”

  “Of course I didn’t know that.” Dulcy was beginning to be annoyed.

  “Because you haven’t stuck it out in a tavern with him. You haven’t put your life on the line for friendship.” Lewis smiled and looked away. She wondered what he thought about her and Margaret, or about Mrs. Woolley’s crowd. Disdain, affection, curiosity—his eyes floated away, but she couldn’t pin it entirely on boredom or alcohol or sadness.

  But Margaret was waiting, and losing all humor, and Samuel realized it. “He was with the German contingent in Peking, in 1900. He was with that idiot who killed the Boxer boy, and opened the whole mess up. He and Joe Wong barely survived.”

  “Siegfried Durr brought Joe Wong here?”

  Lewis cut back in. “Siegfried brought him to Berlin, and Joe Wong brought Siegfried here. Not what you’d expect, is it? So no, Samuel, I don’t want to write about him, or about your friend who jumped off the ship, or your other people who jumped off mountains or trains.”

  “Think of pretty Louisa Peck—you’ve met her.”

  “I did, and she was beautiful, but dumb as a box of rocks.”

  Walton would have loved that phrase. “Is,” said Samuel. “Please, have respect.”

  “Dead,” said Lewis.

  “The Remfrey girl, then,” said Samuel. “You said you heard a rumor about Victor Maslingen not believing it was true.“

  “Dead and mangled. I did hear, but consider the source,” said Lewis. “And by the way, I believe he’s engaged again, and selling the paper. You should point Rex in the direction of Seattle.”

  Dulcy’s skin crept with the strangeness of it all. Her life, not her life; how rotten was her body on that prairie? How many days had it been? When Samuel lit a cigarette, she wanted to rip it out of his hands. “You need a soulful topic,” he said.

  “I may need it, but I don’t want it,” said Lewis. “I’m planning a piece on what Pinkertons actually do to earn money—mostly a matter of following women who’d rather not be followed—and another long series on bullshit medicine. Write your own soul.”

  At the front of the room, Mrs. Woolley waved a smooth arm, and Lewis took the lectern. He began with an essay about why he hadn’t intended to enlist in the Spanish War—he felt America’s involvement was bullying, manipulative, and crassly financial—but he’d fallen prey to pride and curiosity.

  Things had devolved on arrival. A questionable mission, poor planning, boys dropping like insects because of insects. Dulcy could feel unease in the room. “Wasn’t Edgar in that division?” whispered Mrs. Whittlesby, craning her chubby neck.

  “I don’t believe they were acquainted,” she whispered back.

  “It’s a mistake to bring up bravery when you bring up this war,” Lewis Braudel continued. “The bravest thing many soldiers did was to sleep in a camp that would likely kill them. You can’t underestimate the damage done by disease, by the climate—”

  Mrs. Whittlesby waved her arm and broke in. “You have so much in common with Mrs. Nash, both of you out of New York, after all. Perhaps you knew her husband, Edgar.”

  Everyone stared, and Dulcy felt her chest thud. “I regret that I did not,” said Lewis politely, “but the point is really that I don’t recall much of Cuba at all, because I was sick as a dog two months after arriving. I tried to warn Mrs. Mallow that this is not an heroic story.”

  “And the rumored novel—”

  “No,” said Lewis firmly, pulling out a sheaf of pages. “You wouldn’t enjoy it, and the polite bits are scarce. I’ll read another piece from the new collection.”

  Dulcy drained her glass and held it to a burni
ng cheek, and while Lewis read about rich men given to bad deeds and young men given to stupidity, she tried to pluck her mind from the novel’s autobiographical exploits, the evidence that he was good or at least practiced at many things. Walton had liked to say that well-behaved men tended to be boring, and even though the line was self-serving, and even though Dulcy wanted to disagree (hence: Victor), she had to admit that Lewis was not boring at all, even during the long, inane wrap-up. Do you travel? Have you met Thomas Edison Teddy Roosevelt Jack London Nellie Bly William Jennings Bryan?

  Rex kept his arm up stubbornly throughout, and Dulcy wondered how he’d add to the inanity. “How was your hand damaged, Mr. Braudel?”

  “Fireworks. Like any ill-behaved child.”

  “And how and why did you decide to become an expert writer?”

  “I doubt there are expert writers,” said Lewis. “There are only people who try it, and keep at it.” Rex waited, a stoic, and Dulcy watched Lewis’s amusement fade and his face go flat. “I needed to make a living, and I liked to write, and when I fell sick, I tried it again for the sake of a living.”

  Mrs. Whittlesby, whose questions had finished pickling, took over. “But surely you had no financial restraints. Your mother is a Weyden, I believe. I am confused by your name.”

  Mrs. Woolley moved toward the front of the room with the look of a woman in search of a weapon. Lewis folded his papers. “My father was Mr. Blake, and he was married to Mrs. Blake, née Weyden, and the Weydens do in fact all have a great talent for money, and have been invaluable to my father’s career. But my mother was a Frenchwoman who died when I was quite young, and the Blakes took me in, and while I can’t say it was the world’s most affectionate situation, it was bearable. I went to good schools, and I have several half-siblings I enjoy, and I doubt I’d have found my calling if I’d come from a more typical background.”

  Well. Dulcy could feel the surrounding minds zigzag. Braudel meant nothing to her, Blake and Weyden quite a bit. She knew this story, even without the novel: French whore and sad marriage; smart, bitter, wastrel son; a bad engagement involving a banker’s daughter. She very much wished she could talk to Carrie about this.

  Mrs. Woolley had paused a moment in disbelief, but now picked up speed toward the lectern. Mrs. Whittlesby blurted on regardless, as if Lewis somehow had his own story wrong: “But I thought you were Mrs. Blake’s nephew.”

  “No,” said Lewis. “As I explained, I’m her husband’s bastard son. He met my mother on a business trip to Paris, and I eventuated. Braudel was my mother’s family name.”

  No one moved a finger, though every eye in the room pivoted to the floor or ceiling.

  “Should I leave?” asked Lewis.

  Dulcy made a sound, then went mute in a great wave of blush. “Has anyone heard the Widow Nash laugh before?” asked Lewis. “Maybe I have done something with my life, after all.”

  The world is filled with bad luck, surrounded by bad dreams, but if you see a woman three times, in three very different places, you have to be curious.

  —Lewis Braudel’s notes

  chapter 13

  The Brown Book of Invisibility

  •

  Something had slipped away: she stopped waking in dread. She bought a six-burner stove and an icebox and a long table with cherry legs and a tin top, some tidy painted chairs and an armchair to tuck next to the west-facing window in the corner of the kitchen. Irina, who hadn’t feigned grief over Dulcy’s pending departure from the hotel, suggested relatives for plastering and woodwork, fences and roofs, and by the end of the day three had been hired. Now they swarmed through the house, shifting boards and buckets like loud, wiry ants. A cousin named Davor repaired the plaster walls, chipped by the banker’s ancestral portraits; an uncle named Sabon would sand and varnish the floors; and another cousin was in line for garden work.

  She took the rough diamond from Walton’s medicine box to Mr. Hall, on Lewis Street. He was aquiline and bony in a way that made her think—pleasantly—of Walton, and he picked up the pebble, looked at it, looked at her, put it down. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I don’t, either,” she said. “A business partner owed my husband money, and gave him one of these. They bought a horse together, a race horse, with another stone.”

  “What breed?” Hall’s blue eyes were almost aqua. He didn’t believe a word.

  “A Thoroughbred,” she said. “Though perhaps with some Barb. The man was an Englishman who’d spent time in Morocco, but I don’t know where he came by the diamonds.”

  He put the gem down and spun it with a fingernail. “You couldn’t know for certain until you cut it, and that would not be here, but it’s very fine. A thousand, even if flawed. If you have more like this, go to New York or Amsterdam.”

  “But if my husband’s other investments disappoint, I might have some relief?”

  “You would.”

  “Well, that’s lovely,” said Dulcy.

  “And a real pleasure to see,” said Hall. “Let me look it over again.”

  It gave her a little more bone for her back, even given the money from Butte: perhaps she’d keep finding these tokens from Walton until she was rich enough to buy a house in Italy, too. She telephoned the Persian in Butte and asked him to deliver the carpet she’d liked best, rather than second best, and she decided to replace all the windows in the house. When she asked around about who was best for this job, people told her to use Durr, who’d glassed his own studio. Margaret was especially enthusiastic.

  •••

  Dulcy loved lists, to an unhealthy degree, and every night during her last days at the Elite she made a new one: the names of housepainters, books Margaret or Vinca suggested, a story she might try to write, paint colors. Sometimes she included tasks she’d already finished, for the sake of a horizontal slash. A few nights after Lewis Braudel’s reading, she settled into a chair by the east window and arranged her writing board, her pen and ink and green notebook, a glass of wine, and one of Walton’s hundred half-used pieces of blotting paper. Tonight’s list would be the useful sort, the How to Get Walton Into a Clinic sort, with a new twist. She should be leery about this urge to codify things, but she needed to be organized, now that she was dead, and had a life.

  Nursery in town? Rootstock via Salt Lake?

  Soil & manure

  Cedar boxes? Or dig down? Terrace hill?

  Rock walls? Espalier?

  She added seed catalogues before she moved on to more practical topics:

  Mattress

  Bedding and linens

  Fry pans, Dutch oven, sauté, sauce

  This wasn’t very organized. She started to write second sofa , then felt silly and profligate, crossed it out with too much of a blob, and reached for the blotting paper. She spun it slowly while she listened to the racket in the lobby from a fresh load of train passengers, trying to decipher Walton’s mirror writing, all the lost shadows of his live mind. She could make out accounts and temperature, clinic and ship , medicine and meter and mine , all and my and love and rock, jews or jewels. Walton had no issue whatsoever with the one, a great love for the other. She squinted and guessed jewels, the repetitive topic in the rosy book of poetry.

  She eyed her half-empty wine glass, then wrote:

  Everything.

  Miss Randall was weeping again, and the sound ground against Dulcy’s fragile new love of life. The weeping wasn’t a new problem, and when Dulcy had tried knocking on the door of 324 at other times, everything had gone quiet. Still, tonight’s noise was a wail, and now she glared in Leonora’s general direction, put everything aside, and opened the door to the hall cautiously, leery of Lewis suddenly appearing on the stairs. This didn’t, of course, happen, but the sounds deepened to the kind of keen she’d wanted to make when Martha had finally stopped breathing.

  Dulcy tapped
on the facing door and called out, “Miss Randall,” and a tentative, “Leonora?”

  Miss Randall stopped; the door stayed shut. Dulcy knocked again.

  “I’m fine,” said Miss Randall. “Thank you, Maria, but please go away. Please don’t bother me.”

  Bother. All right, thought Dulcy. Simmer in your own snot, you cow. A second later she heard Martha’s lecture—life wasn’t a series of rewards, godly or otherwise—and had a dizzy memory of standing above the lobby of the Brown Palace, balancing a drop.

  Still, having offered, she was offended to be rejected, and she closed her door with emphasis. She thought of the wine bottle but managed some strength of character and filled her empty glass with water. She resumed the chair, the notebook, the window, and saw that the theater cast had emerged, still half-costumed, smoking after the second performance. They had a bottle of champagne, and a board of what looked like cheese and bread rested on the ledge by the cellar stairs. Dulcy was hungry again; maybe she’d have Irving bring up a tray like that, just cheddar and bread. She flipped to a fresh page.

  To do (cont’d):

  Check electrical, gas, water. Coal dealer?

  More shelves? Books!

  A man passed through the alley, and Dulcy thought of Henning: it was something about the way he walked, a kind of strut she’d once enjoyed. Another man approached the alley crowd from the west. He took off his hat for a half-bow, and an actress danced over and kissed him on the cheek. She was the pretty lead from the play—Margaret had pointed her out—wrapped in a shawl but still in hoops for the Pimpernel dress, and she tucked herself into the crook of his arm. Lewis Braudel let her, and brushed a soft, fat snowflake from her powdered forehead.

  Dulcy looked down at her notebook and tossed it onto the floor. It landed open, and she stared down at Walton’s shaky hand:

  Boil me. Burn me.

  All my love.

  Only the green journal had these last three words, added on Walton’s last morning. Dulcy, who had let her brothers bury him, instead, felt her good mood once again trickle away. She climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head; she thought of the Westfield cemetery, Walton and Philomela, Martha and Elam stuck together eternally, dotting a hillside facing Lake Erie. It was probably still snowing there, too.