Dulcy, who was in a foul mood with a sore tooth, didn’t recall a time when Eugenia was fun. The pain gnawed into her mind, burrowed right through her terror of a dentist, and after she writhed through a second night, Lewis pulled out Walton’s medicine box to rub some lumpy cocaine on her gums. At the first vague glimmer of light, the roosters across the street dueled, the town magpies erupted in anger, and Brach began to sing a hymn.
“Say the word and he’s dead,” murmured Lewis, face in the pillow. “No one will ever know.”
She mixed more aspirin and bit down on a wet cloth. “His wife would know.”
“His wife would clean up after me.”
Dr. Hickman’s office was on the corner of Callender and Second; he looked in her mouth and winced, numbed her gums with a stronger paste that made her brain jump, slid in a needle while an assistant told her to shut her eyes. She couldn’t manage that, and he resorted to lowering a mask onto her face, which cured the problem of the jumpy brain. In the meantime she’d pressed back so hard that her fingers had turned white, and the leather on the chair arms remained dented after the assistant pried her hands free, after the mask had taken effect.
When she woke with a gap in her mouth, they left her slumped in the chair. She listened to them prep their next victim through the thin wall, a cocky man circling dread. The assistant slid back into the room and murmured that people were often difficult and confused when they first came around . Dulcy managed to turn her head and lift her arm; her wristlet told her it was only ten in the morning. Her view took in the roofline across the street, deep blue sky above rich red brick, Joe Wong’s children and other workers pinning up laundry to dry on the roof.
A few minutes later she was back on the sidewalk, rocking on her heels and blinking in the light. She resolved to try for the Elite, a block away—she could ask Irina for the key: who would care, anymore? But the Sanborn surveyors, almost at the end of their Sisyphean task, stood in the middle of Second Street, gesturing at Joe Wong, yelling about tunnels. Dulcy thought first of a fire—Durr stood by the laundry and the studio, looking as if he’d inhaled smoke—but even if her face was too numb to smell, her eyes still worked, and no one seemed to be calling an engine, though onlookers gathered. “What is wrong?” she asked Durr.
Her words probably hadn’t come out clearly, but he didn’t seem to notice. “A dead man,” he said. “In the basement. In Joe’s storage area.”
“Not mine !” yelled Joe. “Under the hotel. The tunnel door all of a sudden open, boxes all over. I have no keys.”
“Not his,” said a Sanborn. “Just in one of those tunnels under the hotel, but certainly dead.”
•••
Gerry, in a fresh rage over Eugenia’s departure, was summoned. He told Sam’s competitor, the Post , that Livingston had a Ripper. “A Frankenstein. This body has been butchered to a level beyond my long experience. Eviscerated and reattached.”
This body was too aromatic for Hruza’s Cold Storage, so Deputy Bixby had ice blocks loaded into the shed behind the police station where the disassembled scaffold was stored. Bixby asked Macalester for help, because the county doctor had shingles, and Macalester—retching—took two minutes with the body before he slammed into Gerry’s office. “Your murdered man was autopsied and embalmed,” he hissed. “Badly, but there it is. I assume the death was natural, because the heart, returned to the chest cavity, was malformed.”
“Who?” asked Gerry. “Why?”
“I took the liberty of removing this card from the casket,” said Macalester, flicking the piece of stained paper onto the desk. It was the death certificate for Mr. Errol Arthur Knox, dead since September of 1904, survived by Eugenia Knox, disposition pending.
Within hours most of the story was clear: Eugenia had hidden her husband’s death—hidden her husband—to avoid foreclosure and to continue receiving Errol’s army pension and other payments. There was no money in the Elite accounts, and when Gerry inquired into the real estate the Knoxes had used to secure the loan for the hotel, he found a building with an address fifty feet into the Great Salt Lake.
Gerry owned nothing, and he owed a great deal. He refused to pay for the burial of his uncle, his last relative, and he splintered Eugenia’s apartment until the heavy carpets were crunchy and glittering with all of her gaudy cut glass. Then he sobered up, and the town waited. Lewis thought this was interesting—Gerry might possibly be better off without any family at all.
•••
A few nights later, they woke to a woman’s screams from the Braches’ house, on and on, interspersed with smashing glass, a huge slamming sound and silence. “He’s killing her,” said Dulcy.
Lewis was already getting dressed, hopping into the Bluebeard room to see while he struggled with a pant leg. Lights were on up and down the street, and the screams resumed and blended with Brach’s bellow. But someone had a telephone, and an automobile whirled around the corner: Gerry driving the new police car, Bixby in the passenger seat. Dulcy and Lewis watched from the window as the men ran into the house and a moment later dragged Brach out onto the sidewalk. Gerry kicked the minister until he was as bloody as his wife, who watched from her lamp-lit doorway. There was no wind; they could hear the neighbors protest, and Bixby attempted that’s enough, sir, surely , while Gerry raged. “I’m breaking your hands so you can’t use them on her again,” he howled, winded but still flailing and stomping. “Your feet so you can’t kick the lady. I’m tempted to blind you, so you can’t lecture from that fucking God book again, but maybe she’ll just burn it while you’re rotting in my cell.”
•••
On September 10, after reading about an earthquake in Calabria—five hundred dead? five thousand? the pope wept to hear the news—Dulcy was making jam when someone knocked. Her fingertips were a bad blue, dead-man blue, from pulling off grape skins to chop with the sugar, the way Martha had taught her. Dulcy had thought of using a new recipe that dispensed with this skin worship, but she’d chickened out, and now she had a steaming copper pot of purple paste.
When she opened the door, it took a moment to recognize the boy standing there with a burlap bag, and more minutes to go find a coin for his reward. He left the mess in the burlap, and she went ahead and jarred the jam. The metal lids (no wax, a real rebellion against Martha) were sealing in the background—pop pop pop —when she finally reached inside the burlap for the lost green bag, and into the green bag for her mangled eyeglasses and the lost green book.
It was more or less intact, but the spine felt full of gravel, as if the river had forced its way in, though she could find no hole. She didn’t know what strange African substance had been used to pad the cover, what kind of horse-hoof glue would coagulate back into something as hard as the source. She pried apart the wet pages, trying not to mind that some ink had been washed clean. The poppy petals from Salonica had dissolved, but left an imprint on the pages, and that was good enough: she felt as if she’d found her childhood. She carried the book up to her bedroom and left it on top of the bookshelf to dry.
Beware the fury of a patient man.
— John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel ”
chapter 21
The Fall
•
At the end of September they went to Butte for the reckoning. She’d been tired for weeks, not ill, just sleepy. She’d stop in the middle of a task to curl up in her bed or on the couch or inside the hammock down by the greenhouse. She could be mid–row picking beans or halfway through a recipe. On her usual book–sorting day at the library, she fell asleep at the table, and she missed flagrant errors in Samuel’s purple prose.
She explained while Lewis was going up and down a ladder, loading the bookshelves Durr had helped them build in the Bluebeard room. “We saw the best doctors in London,” she said. “I had no reason to doubt them.” But really, had they been good? They’d saved her but they’d
botched the surgery, and nearly killed her again. When she saw their faces, she remembered the general drift, rather than specifics: this thing had happened because she’d been inherently flawed, both physically and mentally. It had been enough to set Walton off on a rant about St. Augustine and original sin.
Now she hated them all over again, even as the whole warm notion they might have been wrong about everything settled in. Maybe she could have a child. Maybe having one wouldn’t kill her.
Lewis reached down for another stack of books; he was smiling. “Well?” she said.
“Hand me that last stack and I’ll come down and carry you around the house. It’s fucking wonderful as long as you’re happy.”
She thought she was happy. She handed up more books. “Or at least,” said Lewis, “this is wonderful news as long as we find a very, very good doctor.”
“Not here,” she said.
They sat across from each other in the lounge car for the ride to Butte, friends who happened to find themselves on the same train. She’d brought along an issue of McClure ’s and read an Ida Tarbell piece on what the Standard Oil Company had done to Kansas: bad pipelines, price manipulations. What should Kansas do? What could Kansas do? She watched Lewis sleep, scribble rants against quacks, stare out a window.
At the Thornton, they had a grand dinner. They had never openly shared a bedroom together, but there were many things they’d never done together. In the morning she made him wait at the hotel so that she could walk to the appointment alone. It was a nice practice, the kind where she was the only person waiting, very briefly, on an overstuffed couch. Once inside, she gave a bowdlerized version of what the doctors in London and Africa had said, of the sheer impossibility of what seemed to have happened. She couldn’t tell if the doctor, the young president of the hospital (Lewis had outdone himself) believed her or not, but he was clearly used to unraveling women, and he tried not to patronize: She had two fallopian tubes, and the one on her right was perfectly healthy; no idea why these men she’d seen hadn’t thought so. She was perfectly healthy—her ectopic mess had been chance, just chance. If Mrs. Blake feared a second ordeal, he wanted to reassure her. Chance killed people every day, but it wasn’t going to kill her this time, because she was—he said again—perfectly healthy. An April baby, he guessed. Perhaps she should take some time to think, but otherwise his congratulations to Mr. Blake, and please, they shouldn’t worry, and should continue to do whatever they wanted . Doing things kept couples fit—the doctor and his wife had three children, and a happy, perfectly healthy life. After the baby he’d give Dulcy some items to delay a second child.
Lewis was waiting outside; they had some fun calling each other Mr. and Mrs. Blake, which gave Dulcy a little time to let it all sink in. He said there was a fire downtown, and they walked over to gawk with everyone else. Though the city hadn’t yet filled with smoke, the color of the sunlight had changed to the yellow magnetic feel of a tornado, the whole nature of the world shifting as they passed through. The air gave everyone high cheekbones and a consumptive dark–eyed look, and Lewis watched the fire like a little boy, beautiful and in awe. Dulcy was sure she felt a vibration under her feet, not an earthquake but the buzz of the engines and pumps that kept people alive in the honeycomb under the sidewalk. The wind grew, the flames shot higher, and then suddenly the clouds opened to a drenching rain, dousing the fire and turning the sooty streets to rivers.
•••
She didn’t argue about his proposal this time. “I’m not going to be the father of a bastard,” said Lewis. “It’s unkind of you to think I might, given my childhood. It upsets the hell out of me that you have a moment of doubt about this.”
“I don’t have any doubt about you,” said Dulcy. “It’s everything else.”
He called her “doom girl ” for a few days, and then they got back on a train for Fort Benton, which seemed out of the way enough. She wanted to sign her real name for this real marriage, but he talked her out of it; in the end she pruned her lies down to Maria Dulcinea Braudel . They had a nice night in a hotel—a second hotel—by the Missouri.
Lewis wanted to leave, despite a lack of news about Victor or Falk brothers, despite the fact that Leda Remfrey had been declared dead. He wanted a city doctor for her, and he wanted anonymity. But Dulcy wanted fall, and even a dwindling garden was better than no garden. No sweet leaves here like Westfield, flat wet fermenting layers; it was a dry, clear place. She wrapped herself in a blanket most afternoons for a nap, but the dreams and half-dreams of Victor dying returned: one night she cooked his arm, and in another she watched him tacking back and forth on a sailboat on the Yellowstone, looking for her. The harder nightmares were peripheral: hearing the scrape of a chair in the kitchen in the middle of the night, and somehow knowing it was Lewis, but the snakelike arm coming up the stairs was Victor’s. That night, she screamed and pulled herself out of the dream, and then was bereft when she realized Lewis was still away. Another dream had her waking to a man watching her from the chair by the bed, and she was back in Seattle, in sea air and the smell of Victor’s weirdly cloying cologne. This time when she screamed Lewis was home, and he finally talked her into the idea of leaving for California within the next few weeks. Soon.
She thought about the child constantly, moved it though the future—toys, terrifying illnesses to avoid, first books, what apples to make sauce out of this fall for a first meal next summer, what the baby would call them, whether it would still be snowing when it was born, if they didn’t leave for San Francisco. She wasn’t sick to her stomach like Carrie, and she moved through the house and town believing, most of the time, that the world was normal. But she did abnormal things, like failing to cover her garden during the first frost. She lost most of her flowers, and half of her tomatoes, but she couldn’t find the energy to think it mattered.
Brach stayed in Gerry’s jail, and his wife never looked in their direction when she sat in her backyard watching birds. Lewis stopped bothering with the pretense of leaving for the hotel. They hadn’t told anyone yet, about any of it, but it was a matter of cocooning themselves, and thinking it through, and Lewis traveling. Samuel was all about revenge; Margaret had her own life, and her own secrets. No one said a word to either of them about Lewis’s obvious presence, and Dulcy found she didn’t care about what people thought—there were ways to pare down a life other than running away. Storekeepers did not seem to regard her as sinful, and when she dozed through the next meeting of the Sacajaweas, no one offered more than an extra slice of cake. Life skidded by.
But in early October, Lewis woke up sick, and kept being sick, and she called Macalester to the house without bothering to explain. The salvo of fevers shook her out of her daze. He was worse than she’d ever seen him, and it made no sense: surely he would have stored up strength over these last few weeks of good health. Macalester said he was worried about Lewis’s liver and heart.
Dulcy couldn’t imagine his body disappearing. Each time his fever broke she wanted to curl up into a ball next to him. She didn’t understand why some people did well with this illness and others didn’t; she didn’t understand how he could have so much life in other ways and not throw this off. When she woke up with a jolt of worry about Walton instead of Lewis one morning, it threw her into a day of rage and resentment before she settled into all the things that were different: this was Lewis, youthful and her lover. He was a survivor, without self-pity. This was just bad luck.
After a full week of intermittent fever, he sat up one morning, ate most of the food in the kitchen, and wrote ten pages on the piece about bribery in the national parks. He’d have to go to Denver to finish it. She said she wanted him to see a specialist while he was there; he said he’d wait for California, or wherever they ended up. Did she want to go to New York, instead? He’d find a blond wig so that she could take in every restaurant she’d missed.
She’d been cooking obsessively,
trying to fatten him up, going on her own tangents: three days of tomato sandwiches; sudden yearnings for shellfish, root beer, plums. But when she thought of New York she didn’t think of food. On the day Lewis left, she handed him a package to mail from Denver. He looked down at Mrs. Alfred Lorrimer and put the tiny sweater back on the table.
“She’ll only be worried. It’s selfish, Dulcy. And he’ll find out. Save it for our own.”
“This can’t go on and on like this,” said Dulcy. “I can’t bear this.” But what, as he pointed out, had she thought would happen when she threw her life out the train window?
It snowed the day after Lewis left. People talked about how this would pass, but she pulled out the gray shearling and walked to the library to look up the town in France where Lewis now owned a house. She peered down with her river-bent glasses: it was right on the ocean, only a few miles from the Spanish border. There were vineyards there, and fishing boats, and a market. Lewis said the house had a rock wall around the garden and high ceilings.
The next day a huge warm wind blew over town, and she ripped out frosted plants in the sunlight, wearing herself out in the right way. She went to bed early, and woke a little after midnight, thinking she heard a chair scrape, and that he was back, before she thought of the wind, and all the other reasons for noise. It would be days.
She opened her eyes again to a flare of light, a cigarette and then the lamp, a man in the chair by the bed. Pretty taffy hair, green eyes, a little worn at the mouth compared to her memory.
“Sorry to wake you, Mrs. Nash.”
She wanted to roll away from him, curl up and shut her eyes again, but her spine and the back of her head would be vulnerable. When she looked into his face she knew he wanted her brains on the floor.
The Widow Nash: A Novel Page 34
