The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  “Of course I will,” she said. “You’re the one with fevers.”

  “But if you’re not all right, you need to get word to me.”

  He gave her a stepsister’s address and took off half of everything for another ten minutes, and when he ran for the train he let the door slam in daylight despite Brach’s prying eyes. Dulcy lay on the wrinkled bed in the gray light, endless fat snowflakes twirling slowly past the window, and felt bereft: he would not return. She thought of his skin cooling as he moved toward the station. She thought of how altered she felt, and wondered if she looked as strange.

  •••

  By the time Hubert Fenoways died on the night of May 3, he was a pus-filled mess, a stinking pillow of blisters. Macalester had resorted to giving shots of morphine in Hubie’s head and neck, and everyone assumed that he’d quadrupled the last few doses.

  Dulcy heard this after Margaret rousted her for a meeting of the Sacajawea Club, throwing pebbles at her bedroom window until Dulcy opened the door. The Sanborn Insurance men were in the lobby of the Elite when they arrived for the meeting, surrounded by boxes of equipment as Irina checked them into rooms above the bar. They would begin surveying the town the next day, and though Eugenia tried to look miserable about Hubie’s death, she radiated joy. The Sanborns would pay, would eat, and were unmarried: for Eugenia, it all came down to cash and appetites.

  After days spent helping Hubie die, Vinca Macalester was cross, and she brought the topic back to the parade. Dulcy, thrumming along in her new private world, supposed such things had to be dealt with in advance, but thought she might be coming to a parting of the ways with the civic-minded ladies. The theme would be the Lewis and Clark centenary, the inescapable duty of any town on the explorers’ route: Clark, at least, had camped somewhere below Dulcy’s garden, though not until 1806.

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t march as Liberty,” said Mrs. Whittlesby. “We can’t all wear skin hats and carry paddles.” Despite a lack of visible collarbones, she had been fixed on the idea of marching in a toga-style drapery for months.

  “I suppose not,” said Vinca, too tired to argue. She passed around a list of entrants. Dulcy had never heard of the Improved Order of Red Men or the Knights of the Maccabees, and she hadn’t known the cigar-makers had their own union.

  “One hundred and twenty entries, not counting our ladies,” said Margaret, looking for the bottle of port. “A gross.” She was in a fine mood, bearing down on the end of her first year of widowhood without any pretense of grief. She’d planned photography lessons from Durr, and she’d talked Dulcy into the idea of tennis if the rain ever paused. “I will be free of so much,” she said. “Black, keeping a straight face, stuff I hated even before Frank died, for God’s sake.”

  Samuel had given Margaret a book called Widows , Grave and Otherwise , and she loved to offer up the quote of the day.

  May 1: Widowhood is true freedom. (A nugget from Mlle . Desjardins .)

  May 2: Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there is nothing like wet weather for transplanting. ( Oliver Wendell Holmes )

  May 7: Widows are a study you will never be proficient in. ( Thomas Fielding )

  May 9: Why is a garden’s wildered maze / Like a young widow, fresh and fair? / Because it wants some hand to raise / The weeds which have no business there. ( Thomas Moore )

  The sane part of the Sacajawea Club cackled with glee and had another glass. The other half looked sour, and ate extra cake.

  •••

  Immediately after Hubie died, Gerry Fenoways asked around, calmly, about his brother’s last days, but he asked for no firsthand accounts, and almost immediately, no matter how truthful the version Rex or Macalester or Samuel had given friends when they reached town, the story mutated according to resentment, amusement, alcohol. Durr (arrogant immigrant) had been supposed to jump in the pool, and somehow sensed the problem, and let Hubie go without warning him; Rex (spoiled brat) had told Hubie he’d be fired if he didn’t jump; Samuel (sissy boy) had promised to be Grover’s actor at the outset, and had been so unmanned by the earthquake that he walked away from his duty. There was no mention of Hubie blackmailing his way into the job, and Grover’s role as conductor of the tragedy was suspiciously absent from all accounts.

  Gerry’s theories remained unclear, because once he collected accounts, he began to drink so much he couldn’t often talk or walk. He made no pretense of living in his empty house, and Irving was constantly dragging him down an Elite hallway.

  “I bet he can crawl,” said Samuel. “Don’t throw your back out, Irving. Try rolling him.”

  The wake had to be postponed. Hubie waited in an iced box at Hruza’s, which was only fitting.

  •••

  A few nights into Gerry’s binge, Siegfried Durr was woken by Joe Wong’s wife, Ruby, and he jumped to his feet gasping in a room of smoke. The fire was out by then—Joe had assumed the smoke came from an iron, and then traced it to the cellar he shared with Durr’s studio, where he poured tubs of laundry water on a pile of smoldering rags. Everyone imagined Joe Wong was the target, and his wife told Dulcy she wanted to move to Butte, where they wouldn’t feel like darker pebbles on white sand. Durr could move, too—they were good at sticking together, and Butte had almost one hundred thousand people, some large percentage with money and the need of a photograph.

  But Durr didn’t want to move. He told Samuel that he was fond of a woman in town, and Samuel told Dulcy that Durr and Rusalka had spent one night a week together for at least a year. “I would not call it a romance,” he said, and he nodded toward Margaret, who’d just entered the ruined studio with Durr. “And I wouldn’t say it’s just one woman.”

  Margaret was oblivious; she studied the stacks of smoked glass and told Durr he was lucky. His paper stock and portraits were ruined, and the cameras needed to be taken apart and cleaned. It was the cusp of his busy season: graduations, weddings, spring dances. Dulcy told him to sleep in the loft of the framed side of the greenhouse, and said he could use it for his business until he made repairs. Her cellar could serve as a darkroom.

  She didn’t have to bully him. Durr bought an old chalkboard from one of the schools to hang photos, and he put up shelves and drapes. He brought his old carpet, a very nice Persian piece, but it stank of smoke until Rusalka, arguing with him over every detail of the move, blotted the whole thing with waxflower water and worked on the back with vinegar and lemon; Rusalka, who Dulcy now noticed came late and left early on her cleaning chores. Durr put a sign on the street and posted a forwarding note on the old studio, and soon she could see a steady procession of clients from her upstairs window.

  “Is this a good idea?” asked Samuel.

  “I trust Siegfried,” she said.

  “It’s not Siegfried I worry about,” said Samuel. “It’s Gerry. Who do you think’s trying to burn the town? He can go from dead to walking in an hour or two, and then drop again.”

  A night later, a four a.m. fire damaged Samuel’s rooming house. His ancient landlady nearly died, but he hadn’t been home when he heard the fire bells. He took a room at the Elite, on the premise that it would be the last place Gerry tried to burn down, and he told Dulcy he sometimes kicked the police chief when he found him down the hall, sleeping in front of Eugenia’s door.

  •••

  Despite having lost a small fortune, despite having done nothing to egg his blackmailer on, and despite having been splashed by the water that had boiled the blackmailer, Rex insisted on going to Hubie’s much-delayed wake, and he insisted that Samuel go with him. He’d spent time on the piano in the Elite lobby, playing songs like “All Going Out and Nothing Coming In,” then passed into a less charming phase filled with wonder at his many misfortunes. Rex didn’t drink often, but when he did, he drank badly, and he did so now out of sheer guilt over Hubie’s untimely demise. It brought out a kind of
defensive pomposity that probably wouldn’t mix well with Fenoways-style grief. Samuel said he’d stick close to him. He said that if Gerry was going to do something, he’d find a quieter, darker place, because he was going all the way back to his ancestors on this one—he was angry at Rex for allowing himself to be blackmailed; he was angry at Durr for siding with Falk and Macalester about what Hubie had done to the dead girl. He was angry with his mother for dying, so that both brothers needed to be drunk that day. Samuel said Gerry was angry, period, but nothing would happen in a church with fifty weepy old ladies on hand.

  But Hubie Fenoways’ funeral was scheduled for May 10 at the Elks Hall. Gerry had argued with the priest at St. Mary’s before he argued with the minister of his wife’s church, Dulcy’s neighbor Brach. Gerry didn’t want anyone talking about damnation, or suggesting that Hubie’s death had some greater point. He didn’t want any goddamn bells. When the men of God resisted these conditions—Dulcy could imagine Brach’s response—he said he didn’t give a fuck what they wanted, or what God wanted, and Hubie certainly didn’t care anymore, either.

  Samuel told the story very slowly when Dulcy and Margaret met him the next day in the Albemarle lobby. He said that the few women who toughed out the funeral left before the wake. Samuel and Rex and Grover sat together, and everyone drank. Gerry stood up front for the duration, a master of ceremonies. He forgave those who were responsible for his brother’s death, no names specified, but he toasted in the direction of their table: it was over, nothing to be done. More toasts followed, some earnest, most dirty. Gerry sang bad opera in tribute to Hubie’s good voice, and three dancers appeared. One was especially stunning, with thick black curls and long kohl-darkened eyes, the rest of her face and stray body parts covered by veils. She could swivel , said Samuel, who didn’t usually notice. She was just amazingly mobile. It made a person’s eyes pop out. Grovy said he had to have her on film for his other movies.

  “What other movies?” asked Dulcy.

  Samuel waved the question away. The performance was so extreme, especially as the veils dropped away, that he’d forgotten to be vigilant, and only belatedly worried when Gerry gave the girl a five-dollar bill and pointed at Rex.

  “What was the girl wearing, by then?” asked Margaret, a little squeak to her voice.

  “A kind of loincloth,” said Samuel. “Gold and very small, with paste jewels sewn on.”

  “And above?” asked Dulcy.

  “Gold disks on the tips of her lovelies,” he said. “Rosettes. She swayed over...”

  He paused, thinking his way through.

  “Just say it,” said Dulcy.

  The girl with black curls swayed over, danced around Samuel and Grover with little caresses, and bent over Rex, rubbing her breasts against his face. Then she knocked him over with one sharp heel, and kicked the chair away as he lay on his back, and jumped in the air and landed right on his face, right with her fundament on his face, and bounced.

  Dulcy and Margaret waited, their coffee and pastries cooling. “Broke his nose,” said Samuel. “Flattened that delicate thing, blood everywhere. You should see him. Not that his mother will let anyone near him for weeks and weeks.”

  •••

  Dulcy was mostly comfortable with the way memory fell away. But on Walton’s birthday, as she passed a mailbox on the corner of Geyser for the hundredth time, she missed Carrie like a body blow and almost wailed out loud.

  Some days, the real didn’t stay that way; some days, now that she had a house, she talked to herself or to her lost people, floating through time and wandering at midnight. The dead were kept in boxes in her mind, and she tried to open them gently. But that night she dreamed them: she was in a kitchen, putting food on a table for Walton and Carrie and for a naked man. No one seemed to notice he was naked, except for her; they joked, and passed food, though instead of plates some sort of board game covered the table. Green-yellow light, storm lighting: Martha walked in, smelling like lily of the valley, and Dulcy worried she’d notice the man. A moment later she was alone, and she panicked—she hadn’t touched Martha when she had a chance, and Martha was dead.

  She jolted awake in her new bed, to a burning rubber smell, and after she understood that it was a headache, not Gerry burning down the house, she dragged herself to the bathroom and poured some aspirin powder into a glass.

  One of Walton’s clinic nurses, a Breton woman, had insisted that all dreams were a mixture of the past and the future, and that one had to decipher which was which. Back in bed, the true memory gave her something to play with, to soothe her twisting head. She tried to remember what food she’d put down for the man—she could not begin to see his face, and now she wasn’t sure she’d really seen Martha, either. Instead, her mind landed on a memory of Walton in his underclothes on a leather couch, having his reflexes checked with a little hammer, surrounded by the smell of soap and poison while a doctor bent over him and a nurse stood to one side and hummed Martha’s song.

  What was a memory, a dream, a headache? She couldn’t place the clinic—Walton had dealt with the little hammer in a dozen cities. She curled up and pressed on her temples, outwaiting the pain, and for his birthday, she let Walton come back, all the good parts, everything she missed: the weird sliding smile when he saw a pretty woman, the way his step shimmied walking over ruins, his humor, and the fact that though he had more illusions about science than he did about mankind, he stayed a humanist. “I believe in the individual,” he said. “We make our own way, and every man and woman is equal.”

  He did not whine about his blighted childhood, despite having endured food riots and the Redruth workhouse. He’d had no education past the age of ten, but he’d read every fragment of Shakespeare and Jonson, every tedious essay in every magazine. He could parrot on about Roman emperors until he cleared a room or was stumped by a bigger blowhard, and he’d never given up on finding the struggle between the Aristotelian elements—earth, air, fire, water—in every geological event. He knew his modern physics, mathematics and chemistry. He did not lie about being fluent in other languages. That said, he believed some ludicrous things, like phrenology, and he had a weakness for tarot. He was curious about everything, even if he was incapable of admitting error, and he constantly synthesized: in the months before the last trip to Africa, when a loyal friend at Columbia made a study of famine and allowed Walton to compare notes, Walton came to believe he could prove that every period of starvation could be tied to an eruption, and every eruption to a previous earthquake.

  He loved his children and his friends, without expecting them to celebrate every facet of his personality. He knew he was a mess and often managed to be self-deprecating. He had endurance, and a huge tolerance for suffering. He loved women to a fault, or to their death, and he acknowledged that this was his fatal flaw . Even his favorite deck of cards, purchased in London, showed naked women playing their own game, the deck broken down to blond diamonds, redheaded hearts, brunette clubs and spades, and each suit represented by a mishmash of rarities—Hawaiian, Sioux, Polynesian, Tuareg, Hottentot, Persian, and so on. The queen of spades was a geisha, the ace of diamonds an Amazon. Henning had tucked the deck into the coffin.

  Sometimes, during a fever on a ship, Walton hadn’t been able to tell if he was on moving earth or moving water, and in his last week in bed he thought he was on both. She thought of how long that in-between had lasted in Seattle, memories and dreams, his childhood roaring up to greet him, air meeting the ground.

  •••

  Every day was cold and wet. The healthiest thing in Dulcy’s yard was a rhubarb plant she’d found in a corner behind the mason Abram’s leftover bricks. The old grapevine had survived, and miniature clusters snailed out all along the fibery vine, toy bunches for a dollhouse, each grape the size of the dot on a ladybug, each cluster a fingernail. The new trees blossomed, and she watched for bees and dug in wild bursts despite the cold, we
t weather, and a fretful Durr, who brought brides and students into the temporary studio. Rusalka had deserted him, and Dulcy watched him clean at night through a growing veil of plants.

  As the rain continued, a sense of apocalypse deepened. The river bubbled up in low-lying areas, turning the bottomland below Dulcy’s wall into a marsh. An old man drowned on a dissolving riverbank, trying to pull a calf out of the water, and one of the bridges a few miles north of the park collapsed. The Sanborn survey men wore yellow stickers and glowed at a distance, splotches of color glimpsed down alleys.

  Things the Sanborns found, while measuring Livingston’s hastily built foundations: a split cannon, a forgotten graveyard near the hospital, a petrified tree, and a surveyor’s chain that the youngest Sanborn, in a rare fit of enthusiasm, was sure had been dropped by William Clark on his return trek east ninety-nine years earlier. They found a stolen buggy, a lost rooster, a cache of coins buried in a chamber pot, and on May 15, they found the missing Mrs. Peck covered in maggots and straw in an unused stable, beaten and broken, stripped and splayed.

  Inkster, the man who’d stabbed her husband, spent his time in either a frenzy or a stupor after being beaten by Gerry (“He’s not like a child,” said Samuel. “Children care. He just stares at walls and tries to bite ”), but he pled guilty in the hearing, and his sentencing was passed despite a diminished mind. His execution was set for May 24. This additional failure to extend or magnify the most sensational crime in years made Samuel miserable, and he was reduced to photographs and maps and hints.

  On May 18, as Dulcy headed out of her gate, the postman handed her a letter from M. Cope, East 67th Street, New York, addressed to Mrs. Edgar Nash, 509 South Eighth Street, Livingston. She left her gloves dangling on the fence and went back inside to read.