The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  Dulcy didn’t pretend to mind Victor’s pain. “And what does my father do?”

  Henning smiled and looked away. “He tells stories about earth shocks.”

  It was early morning, and an army of bowler–clad men moved around the cab, a school of fish in a port city, under a sky clotted with gulls. “What does the doctor say?”

  “That it’s in his brain; I wanted to say well it’s always been there, hasn’t it? This is just the last stage, true?” A wagon of seltzer bottles dawdled in front of them, and he pressed on the horn. “Victor’s angry, but he isn’t drinking. He is awake all night. They should both go to clinics. Different clinics.” He flicked his cigarette onto the wet cobbles. “The point is all the goddamn notebooks. You must see what might be new, what he might have written down before he forgot everything.” He slowed the Daimler for a trolley, and a covey of office girls, pressed together under a glass awning, surged forward into the rain. Henning watched until the last had boarded. He met Dulcy’s eyes and smiled. “He doesn’t let me out often.”

  •••

  And what would cousin Henning do, if he could get out? Different things than Victor Maslingen, honey-blond coward, rich, pretty, tortured brat. They seemed only to share the same color hair and a great-grandfather, a Swedish fisherman who’d married a Danish fisherman’s daughter and started a minor herring and cod empire (not really a minor thing at all, in the Baltic). One son kept fishing, but the other bought a bigger boat to ship his catch, and by mid-century Victor’s branch of the family had a fleet of ten. They ran barricades during the American Civil War, while Henning’s side raised chickens and taught school. Victor’s father invested another rich bride’s dowry in Pacific Northwest shipping and timber. Henning’s father, a middling playwright, drank himself to death. By the time Henning got into trouble, and his cousin took him in, the whole notion of family equality was long gone, but they had settled into roles: Victor dealt with bankers and ideas and dinner conversations; Henning was pure and pragmatic, a weapon, the man for direct action and dirty work: newspapers, unions, bribes, and beatings. He was tall and wide-shouldered but moved quickly. Dulcy had often turned to see him leave a room she hadn’t realized he’d entered.

  Victor had used his inheritance to buy hotels and newspapers, but had wanted a faster profit, and it came with an introduction to Walton Remfrey, engineer, fixer, inventor of machines aimed at safety—engines and portable braces and magnometers, gas masks and heat suits and probes, hoists and bolts and engine designs—with a royal pedigree. Walton had been trained by Michael Loam, inventor of the man engine, a hoist to bring men up from a mile-deep ore. Loam, in turn, had been trained at Wheal Abraham by Arthur Woolf, who perfected the Cornish steam engine. And Woolf had been trained by Joseph Bramah, who invented the world’s first hydraulic press, Queen Victoria’s favorite water closets, an unpickable lock, a bank-note printer, and a beer-making engine. Walton had access to an army of engineers who knew what not-quite-depleted mines should be bought and how and when they should be refurbished and reopened: copper in Butte and Keweenaw and Arizona, silver in Idaho, everything imaginable in southern Africa, where he’d managed to stay in the game despite the expulsion of other Uitlanders—English and Cornish outlanders—during the Second Boer War. He’d been in and out of the Cape Colony, Natal, and Transvaal for years, gathering options, keeping an eye out for the next big territory, and in late 1900 he swapped Boer partners for British and helped Victor buy three flawed copper mines. In September of 1904, before he climbed aboard the boat to Seattle, he had sold these mines, now gold mines, for a hundredfold profit.

  Victor, his office papered in African maps, would never see the scene of this triumph. He would not get on a boat, and did not even tolerate trains well. He disliked being off-balance, and forays into wine and sex and emotion rattled him badly. He had no direct knowledge of Africa at all, and now that Walton had returned empty-handed and empty-headed, the whole adventure might as well have been a dream. The money was gone.

  Despite Henning’s explanation, Dulcy still found it hard, arriving at the Butler Hotel—not grand by New York standards, but at least marbled—to feel that there wasn’t a small vault of gold left. Victor owned the whole hotel, and lived in the top two floors, just as he had at the Hotel Braeburn in New York. Henning would tell Victor she needed to rest from the train ride, but she went to her father instead and startled him out of a nap.

  Walton began talking immediately: no greeting, no surprise at seeing her. In his dream, he’d been in the mountains, in some Ottoman area, and a kaftaned nurse had given him a bed on the ledge of a cliff, ideal for the view of the rock strata looming above and a canyon below. But one of his legs kept dragging him closer to the edge when he dozed off, and finally he woke in midair. “I felt like a bird with wet feathers,” he said. “There was nothing to be done but fall.”

  A crane trapped in a greenhouse, soggy and white, all sharp angles and flopping plumage. He was flushed and his long hair was damp and tangled; he’d lost twenty pounds since she’d seen him in July. Someone had stuffed him into a high-necked, long-sleeved nightshirt and given him red wool socks. Except for the ceiling-high French windows, the room was similarly padded: cushioned carpets, velvet walls, a tapestry that showed dancers who had very short noses and legs. Victor had packed the room with palms, as if he thought he could coax Walton into an African memory. Maybe Victor thought Johannesburg was a jungle.

  She read through the doctor’s notes and found no obvious slide: he didn’t have fresh sores, his vision was fine, and much of his confusion could possibly be put down to overmedication, rather than end-stage tabes dorsalis. He’d never looked like someone with syphilis: he was a good-looking man, outwardly austere, a cultured figure with a solid sense of humor, tall and lean with a strong, bony face. He dressed well and spoke well and no one meeting him guessed he was sick, let alone that he’d been raised in a workhouse. Under the bespoke suits he tracked the progress of potential sores with pens, drawing circles and stars and arrows around potential gummas, the necrotic holes many tertiary syphilitics developed. His lesions came and went, but they rarely left a scar and almost never appeared on visible skin, his face or neck or hands. He kept a chart in the last pages of his medical notebook listing rumored victims and the men (and women) he’d met at the world’s clinics, with notes on the duration of what he called their benign suffering , and at every clinic, worn down by language—chancres, preputial edema, indolent buboes—he’d peer through doors at the other, hidden patients, his imagination wrestling with the horror of dissolving eyes, food falling through an open cheek. Some people survived for decades without the events he dreaded: a dropped nose or penis or mind.

  Dulcy read the spines of the books on his table—mythology, minerals, medicines—while he told her about the ship home, a new plan to buy diamond mines in Namaqualand, the injustice of being kept captive as he recovered. The cold air from the open window cut through the violet and aspidistra fug, and while she listened she arranged the talismans he always carried: a soft chunk of native copper, one small root of silver, an acorn of gold. He began to wind up: If he could not walk down a sidewalk, was he truly alive? Where did they think he would go, an old unsteady man? Why were his nurses ancient and ugly? He hissed—in a whisper like a magpie call—that everyone was trying to take his money and his medication, and that he’d appreciate Dulcy locating both. His medicine chest had been replaced by a bottle of Bromo–Seltzer and a bellpull. He wanted a new doctor, and he wanted his potions back.

  The chest had been taken away when he’d been found trying to jam several substances up his nose. “Henning says you took too much of everything. They’re afraid you’ll kill yourself.”

  “I should think it would be a relief.” His eyes fogged. “I had forgotten that you and Victor had reached an agreement.”

  “We haven’t,” she said. “I’ve come to see you.” She gave him a sip of
water, but he kept his eyes on the window and a roof across James Street, where a young workman hurried to patch some tar before the rain fell again. Clouds scudded behind the building, which had a glassed turret and an open door. It looked like a fine place to hide, but she doubted the workman would be allowed inside for long. He’d stacked lumber next to the tar bucket, and she wondered if the person in the turret would have a roof garden.

  “My bad moments are due to the state of my stomach. The bilge they give me—raw cabbage and rolls with wheat like quartz shards. Fetch that journal, the one on top.”

  He pointed to a gaudy turquoise silk-covered notebook at the end of the bed. “A new one?” she asked, before she took in a dozen jewel-toned journals nearby. “You’re starting fresh?”

  “No,” he said. “The same old. I spruced them up a bit. This one’s for dreams; I seem to spend half my time having them now. I found a talented Hindu binder in Cape Town.”

  “Why this color?” she asked.

  “Daydreaming. Looking at the sky.”

  Not Seattle’s sky. The air above the workman across the street was a resolute battleship gray. Walton, man of science, had never cared about the sleeping world before. He smelled boozy, but maybe the spruce bows in the hall had ruined her nose. She was surprised that Victor, who was terrified by illness, would knowingly have Walton under the same roof.

  But: the money. She flipped the new book open and stared down at someone else’s writing, a baby’s jiggery lines. “Oh, Dad.”

  “What? I had such visions on this last ship, beautiful things. A woman appeared to me—semi-classical, you know—and as she came closer all the fog or fabric fell away entirely.” He smiled, locked on other skin even though his own looked as if it would crack over his cheekbones. “She was soothing.”

  Inside, he still believed he was beautiful and adept, fast and smart and smooth. Dulcy started to drizzle, tears rolling down her face. “What the hell is wrong with you, Dulce?”

  “You can barely hold a pen. You must have brain lesions.”

  “Spare me, please. I’m only a bit punky, and if your fiancé could find a real doctor in this fogbank town, there’d be no problem at all. If he can’t, I’m off.”

  “He’s not my fiancé.” This was how things would fall apart, if Walton kept it up.

  “Well, I’m sure that’s news to him.” But he looked away, a retreat. Walton was arrogant, but he wasn’t Victor; he hadn’t spent life on an untouchable plateau. So much hung on keeping both altitude (though Walton still used the word as a synonym for drunkenness) and a certain dose of self-deprecation, even in a nightshirt, even with a tremor that could thresh wheat. She watched him seesaw, searching for a safe change of tangent. “I would appreciate some meaningful medicines, darling. You’ll set these people straight. I have a snake in my gut.”

  “No,” said Dulcy. “You don’t.”

  “A snake on fire, running up my throat to my brain. Go fetch a real bottle.”

  One snake would lead to another—he could talk about nearly stepping on a rattlesnake in a Nevada silver mine for hours. She stalled by turning pages: the newest entry was a description of a childhood dream, about being small and trapped. At the end of underground , you can hear the rocks scrape and talk , Walton had scratched out and talk and replaced it with and swell and growl .

  “Is your silly sister cavorting in the city?”

  Dulcy nodded. Swanning, dancing, running a finger too far up timid Alfred’s sleeve. And why not? The workman across the street moved with economy and grace. She liked his curly hair, and wished she were in the turret, though it made her queasy when the man walked near the edge. She was no good at heights.

  •••

  An hour later, Dulcy walked into Victor’s murky feudal study, an acre of Canadian rain forest smashed into four hundred pompous square feet. Her face was calm and scrubbed, and she wore a flattering moss-green dress that went well with the paneling, but her mind seethed. She didn’t want to be here; she didn’t want to be anywhere.

  Henning gestured to a chair. It took her a moment to make out Victor in the gloom at the far end of the room, showing a kingly profile, backlit by the window she had to face. He nodded but did not come to greet her, and she sat down, rattled and queasy, and pretended to look around. This study was almost identical to the one she remembered from his Manhattan apartment, but maps of Africa had replaced logging regions in the Pacific Northwest, and everything that could be thrown—lamps, chairs, ashtrays—was metal or wood. No porcelain.

  He said nothing. He looked well, though her examination was sidelong. He seemed a little thicker, not plump but plush; his frame was still graceful at thirty-five, though he’d never been boyish. He’d shaved his moustache and looked a little less like a catalogue illustration. He had glass-green eyes, smooth skin, even features. His voice was steady and low, his movements careful and contained, his mind a system of angry crevasses.

  He thought things to death, one reason why he hadn’t greeted her: she needed to crawl through all three acts of the revenge drama he’d been writing in his mind before he’d deign to see her as human again. She was here only because of money; she was here because she was the keeper of Walton’s unreliable mind. They’d stacked all the bright notebooks on the table next to her chair, and somewhere above her head she heard a muffled phonograph play soothing violin music for the man himself, who was being bathed by two matronly nurses. Twice Dulcy thought she heard Walton’s cane hit the tile in time with the music.

  Henning lifted the black notebook from the top of the stack and handed it to her with a glass of red wine. Tea leaves, or maybe a bowl of entrails: she was the oracle who’d be executed if she failed to divine a story. “We’ve looked through each book,” said Henning. “And we can find nothing helpful.”

  She wanted the wine, but she opened the black journal. New shiny silk outside, the same musky interior. The first pages, the only part she’d ever seen, were in Cornish, and presumably gave an explicit account of every moment young Walton had spent touching a woman’s skin. Her brothers had filched it one afternoon when Dulcy was about ten, shrieking with joy while they worked out words like bronn and pedryn and kussynnow , lust and seks and plesour . “Say that we saw this, and we’ll drop you in a hole,” they said. Her mother had just died, but theirs had been gone for years.

  When he sailed to America, Walton had left his Cornish evasions behind and recorded women’s names and dates. Failing names, he’d provided short descriptions:

  Beryl, red top and bottom, plump. Bisbee, 2 April 1877, morning.

  Mrs. Jas. Merton, Lafayette at Sixth Street, 13 November 1891. A horrible laugh.

  A Circassian ! Every hair braided ! Constantinople, 7 and 8 August 1899.

  Dulcy turned pages and determined a method: if Walton slept with someone more than a few times, an asterisk next to the name led to a separate page of hash marks and insights. Jane, his future first wife (some progress ; a conversation about alternative methods given her aversions ), was the ninth woman to earn this honor .

  Across the room Victor shifted his feet and picked his nose. Sometimes, when he was nervous, he was capable of forgetting himself. Dulcy took a sip and turned pages. Philomela, Walton’s second wife, Dulcy’s mother:

  So pliable, so reactive.

  Dulcy had never been sheltered, but she didn’t want to know everything Walton’s memory had to offer. She flipped ahead and a carte de visite of a naked woman with a limber leg fell on the floor. Henning stretched out his own long leg, capped with a good boot, and dragged the card closer. He placed it facedown on a side table. She turned to the last entries.

  Ayama, so very tall, Cape Town, last days of August.

  Edina Branstetter (Brandsdotter?), brunette, so ill, 2 October, near lifeboats.

  So, so, so. Dulcy wasn’t sure if Walton had meant that he wasn’t well, or Ed
ina wasn’t well; if Edina had been well to begin with, she might not be for long. Only one of these women had given Walton syphilis, but he’d been criminally generous in giving it back to the world.

  “Did you know?” Victor finally spoke, but he hadn’t budged from the far side of the room.

  “Know what?” asked Dulcy, eying the pile, wondering what was missing.

  “That he was sick again.”

  There was no again ; Walton had been sick for twenty years. Victor had always been good at avoiding unpleasantness, and Walton certainly hadn’t volunteered the truth when they’d first bought the mines, or when he’d introduced his daughter to his new business partner. After the engagement, when business in Africa was going full bore and Dulcy finally understood Victor’s ignorance, she’d watched his face flatten as she told him his partner was syphilitic: he shook his head and walked out of the room, and she never brought it up again.

  “He said he was a special case. He seemed so well, and his mind seemed so clear. Is it possible someone reinfected him deliberately? To bring me down?”

  “There are no special cases,” said Dulcy. “And this has nothing to do with you.”

  “This has a great deal to do with me.”

  Well, she thought. Don’t tell Walton that he isn’t the center of his own universe. She started to speak, but he held up a hand: silence. Dulcy’s face burned, and she could feel Henning study the floor. “We must cure him.”

  “Victor, there’s no cure. It kills everyone.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Your father has mentioned a half-dozen new therapies.”

  Dulcy, with the evidence of Walton’s optimism sitting politely on her lap, looked directly at Victor for the first time. His face was still perfect, but his eyes jumped around the room. The part of Victor that checked and double-checked most situations had always veered away from thinking sanely about Walton’s disease. She could imagine her father’s monologue: all he needed was another month of electrical magic wands or radioactive hypodermics in an Italian or German clinic. All he needed was another batch of nurses.