The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  In mid—June, he headed for Salt Lake to write a piece about the aftereffects of the second manifesto against polygamy, or the Mormon missionary program—he thought of calling the article “The Mormon Missionary Position ”—and Dulcy slept ten hours the first night he was gone, dead center in her bed. She declined invitations to a seasonal frenzy of parties and felt smug, but after a third night she missed him, and on the fourth she woke at midnight, knowing he was back. It was windy, and she didn’t so much hear him as feel the vibration of his steps, catch the sound of the cupboard or icebox, the scrape of a chair in the kitchen. She pulled on her robe and slipped down and he grinned at her, scrounged leftovers and a beer on the table. His shoes were off, his shirt was open, but he looked well. “It’s been hot,” said Dulcy.

  “Not like Salt Lake. I’d douse myself in water, and dry myself, and be wet again by the time I hit the street. It was like being in Atlanta, or Toledo.” He handed her the beer, and she sat sideways on his lap while he finished his plate of smoked salmon and bread and beet salad, and then she swiveled around to face him.

  This was what it was like, then. But Lewis said, no, this was only what it was like for them, and most people were never this lucky.

  •••

  Rex reemerged, face still discolored but in a fine mood, sunny and calm. He’d spent the last weeks in a little rented house on the far side of town, so that his mother’s guests wouldn’t see what had happened to his nose. The bruising had gone from his eyebrows to his collarbone, and he joked (to Lewis and Samuel) about what had gone through his mind as the girl had headed toward his face: nothing but admiration. He’d been so well cared for during his convalescence, and read so much, that his view of the world was entirely changed. He’d read Greek plays that he’d lied about reading in college, Marcus Aurelius, Casement’s report on the Congo. He was renouncing God (in whom he had not, in all honesty, invested much effort) in favor of rationality and humanism. He would dedicate his time and surplus money to good deeds (schools, the poor) and rational plans: he’d scrapped together “the bits of his inheritance ” (more bits than most people) and doubled down on California land. He was done with water as sport, and all in on necessity—dams were the new thing, and he’d begun to eye the narrowness of the Yellowstone canyon just upstream of town.

  They were all having lunch at Bacchi’s. It wasn’t very good—Bacchi served rubbery cheese and called raviolis tamales —but any attempt had to be rewarded. Samuel put down his fork. “Say all that again. The last two minutes or so.”

  “I have decided that there is no just God. There is no solution beyond the better angels of our souls.” He smiled at Dulcy and Lewis, who sometimes forgot that they sat too close. “I haven’t organized my thoughts on charity, yet, though of course there will still be money to help the paper grow, Samuel. Eugenia tells me the Poor Farm is much in need of help.” He stabbed a noodle pillow and popped it in his mouth. “God hasn’t shown his face there, lately.”

  “Is all this happening because God showed Her face to you when the girl dropped on it?” asked Lewis.

  “Possibly,” said Rex, smiling.

  Samuel finished a last chewy bite and put his fork down. “You’re a fool. Eugenia suggested such things because she and the Fenoways own the Poor Farm. He beats people until they’re feeble, and then the county pays him to put them up.”

  “Well,” said Rex. “Something must be done, but in the meantime another charity, then. Would you cheer up if we bought another newspaper? Seattle’s for sale—are you ready for a city?”

  “I like where I live,” snapped Samuel, in a foul mood. He’d planned to golf with Grover, but Grover was at the hotel, “coping ” with his newly arrived wife, Clara.

  “Did he use that word, coping , or is that how you see it?” asked Lewis.

  “He used it,” said Samuel.

  “A little naptime,” said Rex, oblivious. He laughed and rubbed his hands together.

  After Lewis came over the wall that evening, he explained the story of Rex’s recovery: after the incident at Hubie’s wake, the veiled dancing girl felt remorse and came to the cottage where Rex was recovering to apologize. She’d apologized so thoroughly that she now spent all of her time there, and when Mrs. Woolley sent spies, they were told she was a housekeeper. As she had been: Rusalka had worn a black wig to the dance.

  Dulcy, who assumed no one knew a thing about her past life, couldn’t imagine how this could go on without people knowing, without Rex recognizing Rusalka.

  “Because there’s no moral to the story,” said Lewis. “Rex probably wasn’t looking at her eyes, but I think he always knew who it was and wasn’t in the mood to complain. It was Samuel who didn’t have an eye for detail.”

  “Has he ever been in love?”

  “He thinks he has. I’m not sure that he knows, yet.”

  Once, when he was tipsy, Samuel had told Margaret and Dulcy about a love affair. He’d said that there’d been no question of meeting the parents, and then, “gone.”

  “She left?” Margaret had asked. “She died?”

  Samuel had nodded his head, and a tear trickled into his moustache.

  “Died how?” Dulcy asked Lewis now.

  “If it’s the object of affection I’m thinking of, his appendix burst,” he said. “I didn’t like him any more than I like Grover. He was hard on Samuel. I’ve made myself forget the name.”

  He made fun of her later in bed, making love again, when her shock still hadn’t worn off. It was a wide world out there. Surely, given her upbringing, she’d had a little insight?

  Dulcy pulled away and watched him in the lamplight; he watched her back. “I was referring to your father’s medical expertise,” said Lewis.

  “Ah,” said Dulcy. But she thought about his mention of her birthday, her sister, Seattle, and she climbed out of bed.

  “Stop,” said Lewis. “I’m sorry. Come lie down again. Don’t leave me this way, Dulcy.”

  The room echoed. He grinned—he pointed skyward, still intent on the moment, and didn’t realize what he’d said. She took his bowler hat from the bedpost and lowered it gently on top of him. She wondered if she was about to lose everything.

  “What’s my name, Lewis?”

  He looked down at the hat and up at her face, and his smile flattened. They watched each other.

  “You said you loved me, and you wouldn’t lie to me.”

  He took the hat off his lap and sat up. “I love you, and I would never lie to you.”

  “But you have.”

  “By using the name you wanted me to use? By loving you even though you were lying to me?” He spun the hat across the room. “Fine. Maria, then.”

  She was shaking. “Who did you talk to, when you were in New York?”

  “I had friends in the city who’d known you. They were talking about your death, and they called you Dulcy, not Leda, and I guess that’s how I’ve thought of you ever since. But I already knew. I remembered you from the train, and when I read the papers, after you disappeared, I could see your face, and it was horrible to think you were dead. So, you know, it was quite nice to see it again at the Elite. And quite interesting.” He stood and walked slowly toward her; he kissed her neck and wrapped his arms around her.

  “Interesting,” she said, into his neck. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want you to run away,” said Lewis. “I would do anything to keep you with me, and keep your secret, and keep you safe. Don’t doubt me. I don’t give a fuck what your real name is, and I don’t even mind that you’ve lied to me. This is all about survival.”

  •••

  Everything was brighter in Livingston, all the time, than other places she’d lived. It was different than the bleached light of the seaside, or a lakeside town like Westfield: desert light, and desert temperatures, but sometimes the wind so
unded as if it were coming from an ocean, rather than roaring down an ancient mountain or arriving directly from a thundercloud above. At five in the afternoon it was ninety degrees; at five in the morning, forty. She finally listened to the women who told her to shut the house down in the morning and open up at dusk, and when Lewis managed to retreat to the hotel before light, he left at exactly the point she wanted him for warmth.

  But the light: out here, you could see everything headed your way. There was less of a looming sense than she remembered from storms coming over water, but when the scalding light gave way to a wind and black clouds, the fear was just as immediate. She had moved to a place where parasols came to die, were inverted into shuttlecocks and torn from hands, moving like squid. Samuel published a brief account of a rancher’s wife who’d invested in an extra—sturdy model and lost an eye to a rib. Livingston was supposedly too mountainous for tornadoes, but the air still turned green, and from her bedroom window they were lucky enough to see the moment when a cottonwood on the river bottom corkscrewed and slammed flat.

  A spark started on Macalester’s roof, and the doctor’s wing and plunge at Eve’s Spring burned to the ground. Despite talk of lightning, Samuel made noises about delving into the string of recent fires, or simply hiring a Pinkerton to follow Gerry. They all took a drive to see the charred resort at Eve’s Spring, and Dulcy and Margaret wandered around collecting broken bits of azure tile from the cracked pool, hot water steaming up from the fissures.

  A few days later, Lewis took the train to Helena with Samuel for a dinner at the Press Club. She didn’t expect to see him the next night. When Irving knocked on her door, Dulcy was surprised, but Irving looked astounded to be making this trip at all. He wouldn’t meet her eye.

  “Mr. Braudel is sick, and he asked me to get you.”

  “He doesn’t want a doctor?”

  “He only asked for you to come. I don’t think he’s so sightly, but he said don’t fret.”

  Irina was arguing over a bill with the Sanborns and did not see Dulcy take the stairs. The door was unlocked, and when she pushed it open to a gust from an open window, she had a flash of Miss Randall’s room after Lennart’s search, but this was controlled chaos, and the open window was a relief. He’d been sick, and he’d overdosed himself with quinine and rendered himself temporarily deaf, but he bellowed apologies and deranged sallies while she motioned to keep his voice down, so that the people in nearby rooms wouldn’t hear lines like Can’t you do that without clothes or I am so sorry just put me down you don’t need another invalid.

  She didn’t; it was true, but Walton’s illness had been hopeless and revolting and made her angry. Lewis’s made her desperate. By nine he’d stopped shaking, and she hiked the window and waved a book for a fan. He and Samuel had seen a friend, drunk too much, been stupid. “Is this attack any different?” she asked. “Does it ever change, if you drink or you’re tired?”

  Lewis still couldn’t hear, and he wasn’t yet a lip reader. “I was sick by the Philippines.”

  “Too sick to misbehave?”

  His eyes were lazy, but he understood. “You’ve been reading novels. Serves me right.”

  “What does it really feel like?” she asked. “Do you hallucinate?”

  “No,” said Lewis. “I just feel so sick I don’t mind giving up. I used to look for opium or hashish—why not be in a trance?—but I don’t want to leave now.”

  Dulcy asked Irving to bring some broth and watched it put Lewis to sleep. She sorted through a box of books he’d shipped from New York and decided she wanted to read all of them. She poked through the piles that dotted the room—she could date the trips taken by the top of each mound, a train ticket or a newspaper. One stack of tropical linen, layered with a stack of torrid letters postmarked from Bozeman, seemed oldest. She made herself tuck them back, mostly unread, but skimmed through fond notes from his sisters, asking about his health, talking about plays and scandals, a dead girl they’d all known, a runaway car.

  “Dulcy, are you there?”

  He thought he was cold even though he was burning up. She undressed and lay down next to him, wet towels in a basket for later. When he was asleep, she reached for a thick notepad near the bed and read through dated pages of fragments, beginning the summer before:

  Fever dream: birds bleeding onto the ground as they flew overhead.

  Samuel needs to find a larger town for his appetites.

  Chicago after a pipe, watching a girl’s head bob. She seemed to be ten feet away, but she was having an effect.

  What he thought about: not nice things, but honest, and it was all him, fresh and violent and bored and depressed, ill without being in any way languid, and she buried herself into it enough to not hear the lock. She was half covered, propped up on an elbow, when she looked up at Irina in the doorway, hand to her mouth. “I thought he might need help,” Irina squeaked.

  “You do this all the time?” asked Dulcy. “Walk into this bedroom?”

  Irina shook her head, eyes locked on the scene: a feverish man on a bed with haphazard covers, arm wrapped around the equally naked Mrs. Nash. “I heard Samuel say he was ill.”

  “Go away,” said Dulcy. “We’re fine.”

  Which was true, all in all. She imagined Irina’s voice streaming across town and wondered how she’d play the idea that she’d let herself into a man’s room, thinking she could help.

  Dulcy picked up the notebook again.

  Sometimes, another human comes on you like a vision. You feel you already know her, you’re familiar with the line of her cheek, or the way she looks away, the way she studies a menu. You don’t know her, of course, anymore than you know a Venus in a painting, but because you have that sense you decide you will now, and it will make all the difference in your life. It’s the American Way.

  Lost and found: the West as a place to disappear or a place to be reborn.

  Beginnings disappear here, but endings are dramatic. People come here to remake ruin or to drop into emptiness.

  Poor Rex, Poor Samuel. Dulcy is fine, all silk skin and good mind and appetite. The question is not how to be happy but how not to ruin it.

  She began to have the sense that he really only cared about staying alive, and enjoying life, rather than being a great writer; this meant that the snippets he put down were easy and loose.

  “What did the lovely Irina want?” asked Lewis, as if he’d just heard them speak.

  “To inquire after your health.”

  “I never fucked her.” He reached out for a cup of water, and Dulcy watched his whole arm vibrate. He looked at what she was reading, lay back, and shut his eyes. She turned back to his notes, probably from about April—he was guilty of lists, too: laundry , moderation , talk sense into Samuel , $ and goodbye to P.

  P was possibly Priscilla, the Bozeman mistress. Dulcy decided to face the clippings she’d glimpsed labeled Leda R., glued down near handwritten notes from February:

  A girl in the dining car, the blank look of an open future. Pale and dark and tired. She seemed stunned by the landscape, by other travelers who rambled on (the look on her face while she watched the man who brayed at me about politics), by books that bored her. I remember her because she was pretty but odd—faced, and I liked her shape. Sometimes her expression fell away, snapped like an icicle.

  No one leaves a train and what he or she loves in life for any one reason. She was distracted, dressed in bereaved black. She was, moreover, dealing with another girl who seemed to be her sibling, and who was evidently difficult, or at least ill and petulant. We did not talk. How did I know about the father’s body? The blowhard conductor.

  But I recognized her. I knew already: the fallen man on the sidewalk, while people gawked. And so knowing—hindsight is cheap—that this might be the Remfrey girl, I am on the one hand surprised, and on the other not at all. I could not swea
r to recognize her in a group of similar women, in a different season, in different light and mood; I’m not sure that I didn’t want to create a drama around a face. But I remember the face as I last saw it, as I left the train, and it was filled with energy or fear or the excitement that comes from having made a decision.

  She flipped to the last entries, started to avert her eyes from scribbled accountancies, then gave up her selective morality. He’d made a good sum on his journalism and the Cope book, and he had some sort of family income. Geometric doodles, a sketch of a crooked house, a naked girl in profile scattered around lines like this:

  She can die, or she can die to her old life. The argument after the fact is annoying. She wanted to disappear. Running away from something, running into something. There would have been so many easier places to land.

  And:

  What was it like to grow up with such a father? No lightweight eccentric.

  I told myself I wasn’t sure because I wanted her.

  I don’t want to write this anymore.

  She lowered the notebook to the floor and reached for the pile of New York newspapers and clippings, probably untouched since his return at the end of May: business scams, digs at Clark, a car accident that had killed two Columbia graduates, and this small corner item:

  Family Requests that Girl Be Declared Dead

  On the occasion of what would have been her twenty—fifth birthday on May 26, the family of Leda Remfrey has requested she be legally declared dead after months of fruitless searching. Miss Remfrey’s brothers, Walter and Winston, bankers of the city, maintain that their sister, lost from a Northern Pacific train on January 15 or 16, flung herself to death from a train window somewhere in Montana or North Dakota. A small service will be held next week in the city, the location and time to be announced, and a stone will be placed in the family plot in Westfield, New York. This ends a tragedy that began when Walton Remfrey, Miss Remfrey’s father, died in early January.