The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  She giggled until her face was wet. “He showed that?”

  “He did,” said Lewis. “During filming the rubber-tipped arrows caused unhappiness, but he made piles of money, especially in England and Germany.”

  The second film was called Take a Poke at Polly , and featured girls on a bingo board, with male winners who stepped forward to claim their prizes. “Maybe Grover will try chess for the up market,” said Lewis. “More costumes. Think how much fun he’ll have with the bishops.”

  •••

  A week later, Independence Day: the state might not be twenty yet, but its citizens were serious about patriotism, and because of this boosterism and the town’s proximity to Yellowstone Park and the train line, the Livingston parade was the largest in the state. Miles Park was packed with milling bagpipers and Masons, Shriners, and tuba players. A Washington and Jefferson flanked a man in a cannon costume, who looked so much like something else that Vinca laughed hard enough to smear her green face paint. The Hunt Club horses were skittish, as were Mrs. Woolley’s pacers and a quartet of dapple-gray Arabians. The bicycle club members rode in circles, the grocers’ floats handed out candies and fruits early, and the bottling company doled out waxed paper cones of beer and fizzy drinks.

  All of the women were costumed but Dulcy and Abigail Tate, who resorted to widowhood for an excuse, and old Mrs. Ganter, who’d resorted to a heart attack. Two Demeters, grain braided into their hair and belted around their waists (Margaret looked quite nice), two matronly Sacajaweas, and three Valkyries (which made no sense at all). The realtor Nesser’s knife-nosed fiancée was a cornucopia: Indian corn for a crown, green tomatoes and currant strands dangling in her deep cleavage. One tiny woman was a firework, but they talked her out of lighting the sparklers threaded between patriotically dyed plumes in her hat. Eugenia Knox was Liberty, held together by pins that threatened to give way, suddenly and painfully. The float was designed to look like a Lewis and Clark – era dugout, but it wasn’t as beautiful as Joe Wong’s, a ship with dragons and fireworks painted on junk-shaped sails. Mrs. Whittlesby, a rigid Manifest Destiny at the prow, hissed down at the spinning ring of candy-seeking, costumed children as the parade began to move: pirates and Brownies, a dragonfly, princesses and Caesars and one very skinny Joan of Arc with a fringed skirt designed to look like a pyre. They darted around the floats, rolling smoke bombs. The horses were wild-eyed, in a trampling mood, and the wails from phosphorus burns would begin soon.

  Dulcy walked up Second Street toward the depot, bunting blurring the town. The world was a swarm: people on the sidewalk, pigeons over the depot arch, insects, the wind that didn’t quite dislodge the mosquitoes from her neck but made her hat swivel violently and ripped her hair out at its roots. Lewis appeared in his window at the Elite, and she watched him take in the crowd. He saw her and cocked his head; she shook hers, but she began to warm up to the idea.

  The lobby was packed with men having five variations on the same political argument, all of them already spilling beer, and no one noticed her climb the stairs. It was strange having her old view of the street while being had from behind, pressed and panting against the window frame while the parade began to roll below.

  “Bagpipes,” wheezed Lewis. “How fitting.”

  She curled up with him for a few minutes, then left him flopped on the bed. She’d planned to watch with Samuel, who’d said he’d find a spot in the shade of Sax and McCue’s awning. She crossed Second in a gap between shiny backfiring autos and threaded her way between the people who lined the street, and when she turned to look back, she saw that Lewis had roused himself to the window again, and was watching her, smiling and looking beautiful. The bands clashed, block to block, as she made her way, almost catching up with Durr, who paused off and on for shots. And then Samuel called Maria from across the street in a lull between drums, and she turned toward him.

  Through a gap in the marchers, Grover Dewberry trained a camera on her. “Smile!” yelled Samuel, thinking it was funny, thinking this moment was light.

  Her ears roared. Grover kept the camera focused on her as she crossed toward them. She could imagine her own eyes on film, looking out at Victor. Samuel read her face and seemed to draw back as she approached without moving his feet. “No, please, you must take that out,” she said. “Please take me out. Can you do that?”

  “Of course I can, but why on earth should I?” Grover asked, moving on to the deafening brass band that was marching by. “Don’t you know that you’re lovely? Not showy, but handsome. Don’t you like the way you look?”

  “That’s not it,” snapped Dulcy. “I’m a widow, Grover.”

  “Which is why you often wear black.”

  She wanted to smack Grover’s face, but he kept it down, an eye on the lens. Her cheeks burned. “Which is why I’m quite embarrassed to have gone to a parade, all happy and waving, and would prefer my husband’s family to not see me doing so.”

  “Are they modern sorts of people? What are the odds they would see something like a film?”

  Horribly likely, she thought. “Of course he’ll take it out,” said Samuel.

  “Of course I will,” said Grover, looking peeved. “I imagine you’re unrecognizable, but I’ll do it. And if you’re really so worried about your reputation—”

  “Why leave the house?” asked Dulcy.

  Samuel roused himself again, eyeing the street. “She asked you politely,” he said. “But see who’s coming up on you now, Grove.”

  Grover lifted his head and took in the scene he’d been attempting to fit into focus: the police in blue and black, sweating alongside the paddy wagon and the new black-and-yellow automobile, Gerry skipping around from the far side, six-guns glinting in the sun while he waved his arms. The police were trying a new fashion, smocklike shirts with pointy hats, and they looked like Prussian medical assistants, or butchers, or pregnant bakers.

  “Film me,Mr. Dewberry! Just don’t ask me to jump in a river! I have no family left!”

  The crowd laughed, with some nervous high notes.

  •••

  During the rodeo that afternoon, with Lewis pushing his knees into her back in the row behind, Dulcy covered her eyes like a child when a bull trampled a downed rider. Everyone wore their best summer hats, but no one had plumes like Clara Dewberry. At dusk, during a baseball game played in high wind between teams from Spokane and Idaho Falls, the Livingston women watched Clara’s egret and flamingo plumes swivel like a bug’s antennae, and by the time the hat was silhouetted by the fireworks show, the feathers were broken strings and straws. Everyone drank gin and lemonade and beer and ended up sticky and dusty at a dance in the new fair buildings, which did not yet smell of shit like the old barns in Westfield.

  At the house later she was woozy in the bathtub while Lewis reassured her: Grover would take her out of his idiot film, he would make sure, she needn’t worry ever. He washed her hair, her toes, fitting dirty lyrics to patriotic songs. Hands everywhere.

  •••

  The weather stayed hot for a week after the rodeo, and the river level dropped. On July 11, she planted more green beans, and popped a first cherry tomato into her mouth. Lewis left for Portland to do an article on the Century , and when he returned on the midnight train she listened while he dropped his things and walked directly to the stairs, his hat whirling against the bedroom wall. To fall asleep in the middle of the night now, Dulcy could shut her eyes and see Lewis sitting in the kitchen, reading in the sunlight with his legs akimbo, his face tired and shirt crumpled.

  A few days later, a trunk arrived, made out to Lewis at her address. The delivery boys were oblivious, but the people at the station had to be buzzing. When Lewis arrived that evening—he still took the alley to evade Brach, an easier task now that the grapes had grown wild—he was happy to see it, this final gift from his father. He handed her a letter from one of his sisters a
nd lifted out photographs, books and a black cashmere coat, cufflinks and watches and thick portfolios, a sword, a pistol—he checked to see if it was loaded, and when it was, he muttered—an oil painting of a port town, children’s books, journals.

  He sat back. “That’s it, then. We have money, a gun, and a house in France. Not bad.” He put the sketch on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. “We could go this winter.”

  “All right,” said Dulcy. “Just this once, I won’t argue.”

  •••

  The idea of a river flotilla persisted. Bartle had purchased more boats, special safe boats, and they’d take them all the way to town. His men had tested everything, and the ride would be only three hours at most. Lewis wanted to write about the notion of traveling along a river for pure sport, and they climbed out of buggies into a late-season cloud of mosquitoes. Dulcy wrapped her scarf around her face and throat, stuffed her hands in her armpits, and took in the scenery through gauze, thinking of Edgar Nash’s last clinic. “Notice they don’t bother biting me,” said Lewis.

  James Macalester had ridden with them, sorting flies and waxed lines, nearly poking out eyes with a cane rod while he talked about having delivered six babies in the last three days—what had happened the previous fall? Vinca talked of picnics, but Macalester wanted to fish, not talk. He was sick of talking, and Vinca’s vacation ideas had a way of backfiring. He asked Dulcy if she thought they’d be having another earthquake, or possibly a volcano; strange things happened when they tried to relax together.

  She smiled. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Did you know that you say that often?” he said. “I think it often, when I’m at work, but you say it: I don’t want to think about it. I hope saying it works.”

  The women all wore their oldest shoes, skirts and blouses that were flattering but opaque, their best slips, trying to cover the variables of potential wetness. Lewis had wanted Dulcy to wear one of the Martha dresses. He loved them, especially if she didn’t bother with wearing other things underneath. Today she agreed to the dress with a thin sweater, but rebelled with a petticoat and drawers, because the idea of what the river current could do to her skirt temporarily outweighed the idea of what he might do with her skirt.

  Bartle was still annoyingly jolly. There were four boats of different shapes and sizes, two barge-like things that could hold eight, two squat little flat-bottomed canoes with square backs meant for only two passengers. The men argued about whether they were Eastern riverboats or Indian boats.

  Dulcy was a lake girl, raised to fear waves and undertows. When they pushed off in one of the big barges, she could feel wood twist under her feet, and each jolt on the rocks rattled her, and it took a while to grow used to the groaning planks and trust Bartle’s men. When she did, when even Clara quieted down, the world was beautiful, and everything moved with the river: trees and birds in the wind, clouds scudding downstream, racing the boat. She’d brought a green tapestry bag with her green notebook, and now she scribbled down a list of the wildflowers she could see on the hills. Passing under a bridge, swallows peered down out of drippy nests.

  They stopped when Bartle decided to explore some caves. Lewis waited until he was halfway up the cliff. “Snakes,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Rattlesnakes, Cornelius. Watch where you put your hands.”

  They reached a wide, slow stretch. The sun burned, and the wind tugged on Dulcy’s flower bower of a hat, her sloppily pinned hair. Taking it off to fan herself meant never anchoring it again; she roasted and weighed options while Clara piped on, now claiming she’d seen a stream run uphill. After Dulcy watched Lewis lower his hat in the water and flop it onto his head a second time, she finally took out the pins one after another, dipped her hat in the water, and only gave it a token shake before she plopped it back on her head. Cold water ran down her back and over her collarbone, between her breasts. “Better?” asked Lewis.

  “Yes.” But the pleasure had worn off by the time they stopped again. She peeled off her shoes and stockings and stood in the river, letting the water numb her ankles. Lewis walked over and looked down at her blue feet, then back up at her face. She could smile back; she could strip him to nothing without anyone knowing.

  They picnicked under cottonwoods, on grass flattened in circles by bedding deer. Rex had brought beer, and Bartle’s cook had made dried-out meat pies. Grover never aimed his film camera at Dulcy; he hadn’t talked to her or to Lewis at all. After the parade she’d sent a note, and Grover had given Samuel a little melted twisted bit of celluloid. Durr had been coming through the yard when Samuel passed it on, moving his studio back downtown. “Where did Dewberry have it developed?” he asked.

  Samuel didn’t know; why did it matter? Grover had done as Dulcy asked, and Durr needed to stop thinking the worst of people.

  Now Margaret photographed Durr photographing the trees. Rex had brought Rusalka, a quiet debut, and they wandered out of sight around a bend in the river. Dulcy lay back and watched the cottonwood tops move against the sky. The trees made popping noises as they swayed, but Grover was talking again, explaining how he was a visual man , as if any of them had thought otherwise, as if any of them cared beyond Clara, who said things like you are such a poet , darling .

  “I’ll quote a poem,” said Lewis. “‘The thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.’”

  “You’re welcome to it,” said Grover.

  “You have no idea, Grover. Pipe down. Mrs. Nash, would you accompany me? You’re the quietest person on this beach.”

  She lifted her green bag, with her glasses and the green book, into the little canoe-like boat. She wasn’t sure that Lewis knew how to handle it, but she was wild to get away, while Grover announced that he was taking the other small boat with Samuel and Macalester’s rod. Would Durr film them trying to fish with it?

  “I don’t think it would be advisable from that boat,” said Macalester, taking the rod away.

  “I have my own photographs to take,” said Durr, climbing into one of the barges with Margaret.

  Dulcy clambered into the little canoe. Its sides felt like paper, and the water looked violent. “Keep your eyes in your head,” said Lewis. “We’re all right. We’ll find a place and swim and take a little nap.”

  He’d left his hat in the barge. “You’re getting a sunburn,” she said. “Would you like mine?”

  “You’ll burn your pretty nose.”

  “Not in the fifteen minutes it’ll take to save yours.” She dipped the hat again and lowered it onto his head.

  “Jesus,” said Lewis.

  “He doesn’t hear you,” said Dulcy. “What are you doing?”

  “Slowing the boat down, so everyone goes ahead. Then we’ll take that channel.”

  “Do you think it goes all the way through?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lewis. “We may regret it, but right now I only regret not being wet and not ripping your dress off.”

  “All right,” said Dulcy, watching Samuel and Grover disappear.

  They found a pool that was just deep enough, and she spread the blanket behind a downed cottonwood. Bodies had never looked so white; sand everywhere despite the blanket. When their skin dried and tightened they went into the water a second time. “Someone will come looking for us,” said Dulcy.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Lewis. But back in the boat, in the main channel, the pace of the current picked up. Dulcy squinted ahead to an obstacle course of rocks and downed trees.

  “This was a horrible idea,” muttered Lewis. “I’m going to kill us both.”

  “Pull out,” she said. “We can just leave the boat and walk.” They came around the bend and had a glimpse of Grover and Samuel. They were having the same problems with their boat, and Samuel was yelling.

  “Hold on,” said Lewis. She saw a tree just under the su
rface ahead, and he pulled hard to the left. Her bag flew into the water. She saw her green book inside it as if it were one of Walton’s crackling X-rays, and lunged for it, and went over into cold and gravel and violence.

  Under the cottonwood, she opened her eyes. She was tied to the tree and her hair and arms were being pulled from her body. She tried to push up onto her back, to get her legs up into the current, but the water held her down, and something began to wrench at her waist.

  It was Lewis, underneath her and then upstream. Her feet found rocks and she gulped air before he dragged her into a sandy backwater. The bag was gone, along with the boat, their shoes, her glasses, and she wept. Lewis fished her braid out of her ripped dress and weeds out of her braid, lowered her on the warm sand, and lay down next to her, with an arm around her head.

  They stayed there for a long time, and when they looked up, a boy was standing next to them. “Hey there,” said Lewis. “Do you live near here?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “Do you think someone could give us a ride to town?”

  “I do.”

  “We’ve lost our things. If you find a bag sometime, a green bag with a green book, can we give you a name, and you’d find us? It’s very important to the lady. Will you remember the name Mrs. Nash? You could take it to the Elite. Have you seen the Elite Hotel?”

  The boy, a burnt gold version of Irving, said I have and I do again, and Lewis resorted to repeating himself, then pounded the point in by finding a half-dollar in his wet pocket and handing it over. “So,” he said finally, “could we find your father and ask him for a ride?”