The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  By the time he had to abruptly board a ship again late in 1901, this time to England after Victor had responded poorly to his broken engagement with Dulcy, Henning had begun to wonder at the point of returning. Victor had been drinking heavily, which always made him a little looser, a little likelier to act directly, and had started a fight at a friend’s wedding party that continued at the bars in the Village. The next morning a dead rich boy was found frozen into winter mud in an alley off of Bleecker Street, and Henning was perceived to have the least to lose as an inquiry began. Victor’s parents put him on a merchant ship to Southampton with a chunk of blood money in his pocket; Victor offered more if Henning found Dulcy in London and reported back.

  In London, Henning did find Dulcy, and followed her long enough to understand what had happened, though he did not telegram Victor for weeks. He walked around the city, thought things through, and ended up buying himself a job at Clarendon Studios. He held the cameras for Alice in Wonderland, and he even did well writing the scripts, because his very direct English had a good pithy ring. He read—he still read—all the hours of the day he wasn’t working or sleeping around—and decided that he’d been born to record beauty: Shakespeare, fables, history. He didn’t want to film a stage—why limit yourself if you didn’t have to? Why not film The Tempest on a beach, or A Midsummer Night ’s Dream in a forest; why not give the words of the whole play underneath, while the image spooled out? If Henning could keep up, even with an immigrant’s English, surely the average schtuck could manage.

  “Schmuck,” said Dulcy, as Henning explained all of this to her on a bench at the British Museum and promised that he wouldn’t tell Victor about the pregnancy.

  “I worry he’ll kill you,” he said. “If he knows, he’ll kill you.”

  Victor also left New York in the wake of the fight, and he took the train west. He bought the Butler in Seattle, and when the Maslingen family deemed it safe for Henning to return to this fresh coast, the balance had changed between the two young men. Henning had a key for every lock in the apartment and the padlock on the wine cellar, the combination for the safe, the numbers for all bank accounts. Henning had said no to selling his stake in the London film company to help Victor through the African mess. He had planned to use his 5 percent of the African profit to begin filming plays in London in April.

  “Does this ruin things for you, too?” Dulcy asked now, out on the balcony in Seattle.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m patient.”

  Henning liked to scribble down all of Walton’s mythic memories, and twice during their stay in Seattle, he set up a camera and showed them some English films: How to Stop a Motor Car, Alice, The Mistletoe Bough. Walton wanted to watch them over and over, the projector overheating. On other nights, Dulcy and Walton would play rummy or cribbage, though he had trouble holding cards or pegs, and sometimes she set up a skittles game, though he couldn’t pull his own top. Sometimes she read to him, and sometimes she gave him extra medicine and hid in her room. Sometimes he was himself, wandering from topic to topic: a plan to move to Veracruz to grow coffee, a consideration of his ultimate vindication by the Royal Society. When she got him to talk about the last few months in Africa, he seemed more or less coherent, but if she surprised him with a question about the money, he’d flinch, a little shard to the brain, and then they’d wade through confusion.

  Did he want to see Carrie? she asked. Let her dance, said Walton. The Boys? Let them bank. “Carrie eventually,” he said. “I can do without a lecture from my sons.”

  Eventually was an admission, which might help in the end, but he veered away. “Let’s have a game: If you were a bird, which?” He’d never cared a thing for birds, but Henning had given him an illustrated Swedish guide, all the colors cheerier than nature, and the names broke him out of that morning’s echo chamber: bats, battery, butter, bitter.

  “A nuthatch,” said Dulcy. The only bird that tended to eat upside down.

  “Sanglarka or notvacka!” He was delighted. “Carrie, all tall and pink, would be a flamingo, or better yet a roseate spoonbill, but there’s no good translation, naturally. Skedstork. Spoonbillen .”

  He rattled on: owl was uggla, crow was kraka, bluebird was blasangare, curlew was spov. Gull was gratrut, which sent him spinning off to Gertrude, and Shakespeare. He summoned Henning for a copy of the plays and, dithering over which to read first, flipped the volume open to The Merchant of Venice . Dulcy, who was curled in the chair by the window and had fallen into her own fascination with Swedish bird names, knew the volume would be too heavy for Walton to hold, but Henning was so transparently happy she said nothing.

  “It’s an ugly play,” said Henning. “And not fair. Have The Tempest or Much Ado.”

  “Ah, but it’s the way our world works,” said Walton. “Cunning, dunning, haunting, hunting, Henning, lending, lemming.”

  Henning sounded the last word out, and his face burned.

  “I’m sorry,” said Walton, suddenly sane. “My mind goes at its own pace. Please accept my apologies. You will outthink us all by the end. Tell Dulcy the word for hawk.”

  “Falk ,” said Henning.

  •••

  Two weeks after Dulcy arrived, Walton demanded a dressing gown, insisted that they all dine together, and took Henning’s seat at the end of the table facing Victor. He lifted an empty wineglass with an arched eyebrow. The staff hustled; Dulcy began to daydream of her own disappearance and tried not to watch her father talk and eat at the same time. Walton’s newest topic was the Rift Valley, which would surely be the site of the next great hard-rock rush after Namaqualand. They should buy now, before the fucking Germans figured out the fucking truth . Victor, who hated swearing, chose his battles. “I have nothing left,” he said. “You have lost my money.”

  “Don’t fret,” said Walton. “Your money is in New York, practically speaking. I had it wired.”

  “To which bank?” asked Victor.

  “The bank you told me to use.” Walton dabbed his mouth, lurched upright, and left the room.

  Dulcy started to follow, but Henning stopped her: he’d hired an agency to search for a wire, but so much money traveled into and out of the Rand that the task had proved impossible.

  “If he kept the profit as cash or a check,” said Victor, “if he did not deposit it in some forgotten bank, it may have been taken from him on his way home. He talked of diamonds, but we can find no evidence he changed out the money. While I recognize his love of the symbolic, gold is hardly portable. He said something about a friend, a man named Penlawy who advised him, but our detectives haven’t managed to find him. Have you met this man?”

  Dulcy stared down at Emil’s spongy fish. “Penlawy?”

  “Yes. Charles, I think.”

  “Penlawy was his childhood friend. He was sliced in half by a rock fall when Dad was a boy. A fall of quartz, before he even went to Ireland.”

  She watched Victor’s mind go dark. In the corner, Henning hummed. It sounded like a lullaby, and she tried to imagine his mother, singing to her little boy. “He’d have said if it was stolen,” said Dulcy. “He’s never shied away from assigning blame before.”

  Later, after Emil had tottered off to bed, she gave Walton a whiskey and made potatoes poached in cream, with a little sharp cheese. He ate like an ardent man for the first time since she’d arrived, and when he’d wiped the plate, he said, “Ah, well, I found out that someone from the bank had contacted wreckers, and they would have been lying in wait. I changed my plans.”

  “Lying in wait where?” If he had wreckers on his mind, land wreckers rather than the people in his childhood who’d raided foundering ships, he was back in Cornwall.

  “Jeppestown,” he said. “A man named Brahn oversees these grabs, and he kills.”

  She telegrammed Robert Woolcock again and learned that he’d heard of a highwayman named
Brahn, but when Brahn was found, he didn’t have a fortune, and when he was beaten, he didn’t produce an answer.

  The next day, Walton said, “The Hindu had seen everything in terms of hiding and thieving money. Wonderful stories.”

  The Hindu was the bookbinder named Iyer; he and Walton had become friends over the course of the expensive rebinding of the notebooks. Dulcy said she imagined Iyer must have plenty of his own money to hide, given his fees; she said the journals looked like pillows at an Indian wedding, gaudy wrapped gifts.

  “You must be back to loving Mr. Maslingen’s subtle high-society style,” Walton said.

  Vague to vicious in seconds. He complained of shooting pains in his eyes, and the next day the doctor visited and whispered that the right eye was bulging. Dulcy sent Carrie a telegram:

  Afraid you need to come. Dad quite ill . Don’t tell boys yet.

  And Carrie wrote back:

  After Christmas. Very busy, in fact engaged! I don’t believe a thing about him.

  That night, while Dulcy lay in a bathtub, the room shuddered, the bathwater moved in a new direction, and the buildings across the street swayed. She watched the window glass move and thought about what might happen next: she’d fall, more or less intact and still wet, through the six floors below her, crushing the innocent beneath her cast iron, cushioned by water and bubbles and the fact that right now, feeling the ground throb, she felt a great indifference. People who cared the most were struck down in a disproportionate ratio; death would only happen to her when she no longer wanted it to.

  When everything stopped moving, she slid down into the water so that only her face and knees showed. Even underwater, she could hear Walton howl in happiness through the wall. An hour later, when she went to say good night, his bed was empty. Henning found him at midnight at a tavern near the station, a ticket to Sacramento and a suitcase in hand, four whiskeys into his escape. Walton had never been much of a drinker, and he was sick on the way back to the hotel, ruining Victor’s car. He told Dulcy he’d been on his way to Lone Pine, to relocate a successful mine, and when he managed speech over the next few days, he said many other things: that he had sold the African mines, that he hadn’t, that he’d been paid, that the buyers had refused to pay him, that there were no mines to sell, that he had been in Chile, not Africa, that his head hurt terribly, that someone should tell his mother he’d be home soon.

  •••

  Woolcock’s account of tracking Walton through Africa arrived in seventeen numbered telegrams. Number fifteen was missing, which put Victor into spasms of paranoia; he and Henning had been off courting money when it arrived, and Dulcy was in the habit of checking his desk. It had alluded to her illness in Africa three years earlier, and it was nothing Victor needed to know. She burned it while she sat on the fire escape, smoking another cigarette.

  The sale of the mines had been scheduled for September 12. Walton had asked the purchasers to draw up a single bank check, without percentiles to the partners (80 percent to Victor, 15 to Walton, 5 to Henning), and said he’d carry the check to Johannesburg himself. On September 10, he delayed the transfer of ownership by requesting gold and an escort in lieu of paper; such a request wasn’t out of the ordinary in post-war southern Africa. He had asked Woolcock about who would be safe to hire but insisted that he not worry about coming for the transfer.

  Now, Woolcock learned that the Bengalis he’d suggested as escorts had never heard from Walton, and people allied with the new owners said that Walton had arrived with five black men and left with gold. Nothing more, nothing less, everyone in a fine mood. The staff at the Mount Nelson said Walton had arrived alone on the evening of September 16. He seemed tired and carried a satchel. No one at the stations in Johannesburg or Cape Town had seen an escort of blacks, or heavy freight.

  Dulcy had a fantasy: They would put her on a boat. Having proved herself with Woolcock, she would sail off, find the money, save the day, and disappear. Over the next few days, while telegrams darted back and forth and Victor roared directly at Walton about bankruptcy, humiliation, ruin for the first time, this fantasy—of running away being a useful thing, instead of a convenient act of cowardice—took hold, and during longer daytime walks Dulcy headed up Second Avenue for useful travel items, and up an even greater hill on Pike for the sake of character improvement and fitness.

  On a windy day after the delivery of telegram seventeen, she turned to catch a section of a newspaper that had just blown from her hands and thought she saw Henning. Looking like Henning was not an average thing. She waved, but the man disappeared.

  The next day, she left a bookstore (a new Baedeker for Sicily, Tunis, and Corfu) shadowed by the same sort of man, but this version of Henning had red hair. She walked on to the post office with letters for Carrie, her aunts, and Walton’s brother, Christopher, who was the Methodist minister of Pachuca, near Mexico City. When her follower didn’t have the sense or nerve to come in with her, she left by the side door, shedding him and trying to leave behind a crushing but nonsensical disappointment at the idea that Victor and Henning did not trust her. She should be flattered: they thought her capable of running away, maybe even of stealing a million dollars.

  When she reached the apartment and the hall to the bedrooms, she saw Henning come through the door to the servants’ stair. He slept at the other end, the guard dog near Victor’s bedroom, but he was straightening his shirt, and when he saw her he looked away.

  “You’re a busy man,” said Dulcy. “It’s good that you have brothers to help with chores. What are their names, again?”

  Henning met her eye as he fixed his tie, and behind him, in the stairwell, she heard a maid’s footsteps. “Carl, Martin, Ansel, and Lennart. I believe you saw Martin.”

  “Where do you think I’m going to run away to?”

  “Anywhere, I suppose,” said Henning. “But he’ll keep you here until the money’s found or your father is dead. Make the best of this.”

  “Send me to find the money, then,” she said. “I can’t bear this.”

  He walked away without answering her.

  Dulcy spent the next three days walking miles, losing her Swedish tails behind produce stands, in the museum, and—cruelly—on the ladies’ underthings floor of the Bon Marché. The bone from her childhood break still hurt sometimes, but she embraced this bitterness, too. On the fourth day, Henning drove two of his brothers down to the harbor for a reversed version of Walton’s travels—Seattle to San Francisco to Hawaii to Melbourne to Cape Town. She wanted to snap out a Walton quote—They couldn ’t wade through hummingbird shit in boots —but she ran out into the rain for one more walk, and when she returned, she stayed in her room or in Walton’s, and listened to Victor walking the hall.

  A few days after the Falk brothers departed, Walton announced that the proceeds from the sale of the mines would arrive with a man named John Viram Singh, on a packet ship called the Silver Moon , in the form of a check from the Bank of Cape Town, a different branch than the one he’d first remembered. He should have told them earlier. He had forgotten.

  No such ship was scheduled into Seattle, but a Silver Star was due into San Francisco in five days, carrying a passenger named V. Singh. Dulcy, sensing misdirection and envisioning the debarkation of an elderly Sikh cloth or curry merchant, grew queasy when Victor reacted with elation. Henning decided to go to San Francisco himself, and Victor insisted that they go to the station together. At the platform, though she knew Henning was watching her, she studied the times for the eastbound Empire Builder. He did not look worried—Henning looked however he liked—but he leaned down and whispered, “Don’t hook it, Dulcy.”

  “No one says that anymore,” said Dulcy.

  “Your father does,” said Henning.

  •••

  It rained; with Henning gone, Dulcy again stayed in her room or in Walton’s unless she knew Victor had left th
e building. They’d gone two days without having to see each other when there was a knock on her door.

  “Let’s go out,” Victor said. “We should have a conversation.”

  “I’d rather not,” said Dulcy.

  “I’d rather we did,” said Victor.

  One of Henning’s remaining brothers drove the car to the feeble new botanic gardens. It wasn’t raining for the first time in days, and as they walked, not talking, Dulcy peered at plant labels.

  “I’m engaged again, you know,” said Victor, finally.

  “I had heard. I’m happy for you.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Victor, smiling. “But I can live with that. I can’t imagine being happy for you with another man.”

  A covey of older women fluttered by, eyes on Dulcy, who preferred to let that sentiment slide away. During their engagement, Victor had planned gardens for her: a greenhouse on the roof of his Manhattan hotel, walled gardens at the Hudson Valley house. He had never shown an affinity for live items, either flora or fauna, but he’d understood this about her. Now she tried for something like a normal conversation. “Does your fiancée like to garden?”

  “I haven’t heard her mention it.”

  “What does she like to do?”

  He frowned. “Now you’re worrying me. Perhaps I’m better off without her. She isn’t curious, or experienced; she doesn’t understand the world.”

  Dulcy turned back to the waiting car. “I believe he’s lost the money,” she said. “There’s no point in keeping us here.”

  He kicked a stone off the path. “There’s no point in letting you go, either.”