The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  They returned to find that Henning had met a Mr. Singh, who did in fact carry a package for Walton, but it was a last rebound notebook, rose-pink poetry. Dulcy burst into tears—it was a bad habit, but an honest one—and retreated to a balcony off the sitting room. If she went to her room, she’d hear Walton warbling “Skip to My Lou ” or a stunningly filthy sea chantey, and if she ran to the fire escape, she’d hear Victor beating his own mind to death in the gymnasium. Henning joined her a few minutes later, and they smoked in silence while he studied the women at a party on a balcony below them, guests of the hotel proper. Dulcy watched his face and thought of fishing birds, crows on fences, cats on rodents.

  And in the morning, Victor introduced a new plan: since nothing stirred Walton’s memory in the apartment, perhaps they should get him out and about. If he were given the “illusion of freedom,” of fun and play, would he rediscover his mind?

  Victor was flushed, and Dulcy didn’t immediately understand. “I suppose he’d love the theater,” she said. “And we could use some games here. A dart board, or billiards.”

  “I do not enjoy billiards,” said Victor.

  This meant that he wasn’t good at them—if he wasn’t good at something, he couldn’t enjoy it. Dulcy thought she’d enjoy being bad at many things, if she could only try. “You’re good at Ping-Pong. And if you dislike it, you wouldn’t have to play. You’d just have to buy the table.”

  “And watch you play, with Henning.”

  Henning was pulling on his coat, taking time over his scarf. She almost said yes, and then she took in Victor’s face. The nurse was yammering about rain and inappropriate shoes. “I had a trip to the outside world in mind,” said Victor, “though I fret about the dangers. He’s not well.”

  “I’ll keep him alive,” said Henning. “I’ll keep everyone alive.”

  He had the nerve to look at her, though she knew it took an effort. “You’re taking him to a woman ?” she asked. “What about the poor woman?”

  Victor gave a fake laugh. “I’ll find the right person,” said Henning.

  Dulcy had a pen in her hand and thought of throwing it like a dart; her interior monologue was pure mining Cornish. Henning, prowling the misty streets—he might be stuck here with maids six days a week, but there was no question that he fucked himself silly in the off-hours.

  “Everyone will be safe,” he said. He looked happy, and young, a little wide-eyed, wild to be out of the building. If she could have painted a human state, she’d have called this Vigor . He was going to make his Grecian marble physique move in a variety of warm, soft directions, after he handed over a giddy Walton to a hag with a dozen gold coins. “But I agree about the games,” he said. “Something pleasant in these dark months.”

  “Go away,” said Dulcy.

  •••

  Happiness, safety: she thought through the range of definitions as the men set out for Chinatown, Walton with his head high in a dove-gray coat. But he responded to his outing by sleeping for twenty-four hours, and when he woke he told Victor he hadn’t been to Africa for ten years, and that something was growing in his stomach. A new doctor was summoned, a cold, calm Presbyterian, an advocate of the Graham school. Decades of hydro—and electrotherapy had left Walton underwhelmed by such approaches, and he was fractious from the beginning. In the absence of female comfort, he believed in opium, alcohol, and mercury. Dr. Dagglesby believed in bran and cold surfaces and—weirdly—large quantities of shellfish. He asked Walton to take some steps (“note the tabetic gait ”), looked at his hands and feet, ears and eyes, and asked him to stand naked and perform certain exercises. Walton said that he would attempt these after a quick trip to the toilet, but once inside he locked the door.

  “Mr. Remfrey does not have long,” said Dr. Dagglesby.

  “Please keep your voice down. Please think of something to help,” said Victor. “We would like him to be as relaxed as possible. Peace of mind may help his memory.”

  “Where would he store that memory, might I ask?” said Dagglesby. “His brain has shrunk to the weight of a web.”

  They all knew Walton had been able to hear this through the door. Later, when she heard him pace on the other side of her wall, she left him to it and turned out her light, and later still, when she woke to the sound of a woman laughing, she rolled over, trying not to think of Henning. Another resonant croak brought her into the next bedroom, where she found a heavy woman, a bouncing billow of flesh, seesawing on top of Walton’s frail body.

  They gaped at Dulcy. “The floral flouncing floozy flummoxed me,” said Walton.

  Dulcy slammed the adjoining door, slammed her own door, and ran out in the hall and slammed Victor’s library door so hard that the pretty bronze knob came loose and bounced away, which brought enough relief to allow her to head to her room to pack a valise. She took the servants’ stairs and was just short of the hotel mezzanine when she faced Henning, who’d taken the elevator all the way down and run up. “No,” he said. “You can’t leave him.”

  Which it, she wondered. Run away with me, then. But she let Henning take the valise, and she walked back up the stairs, knowing he was just inches behind. They opened the door to a wail: Victor, bellowing for help, because Walton was having a seizure.

  Victor stayed pressed into a far corner while Dulcy held Walton’s foaming head on her lap and Henning tried to buffer his jerking body. But by the time Dagglesby reached them, Walton was peaceful and smiling. “I’d appreciate it,” he said, “if you could manage to make these episodes stop. They’re quite embarrassing.”

  “They’ll stop,” said Dagglesby. “You’re on your way. You’ve put this off a good long time, but there’s no getting around it.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” said Walton.

  Dagglesby had a dark, cropped beard, and his face had gone brick red. “Well, you’re dying. The thing’s winnowing through your cerebellum. Have you heard me at all? What did you think would happen, twenty years in? Tell your children you love them. Write letters.”

  “Devil,” said Walton. He gestured Henning to help him up, and he propped himself on the teak changing bench and said, “I am reminded of the words the great painter Turner directed to his physician: please go downstairs, have a sherry, and then look at me again.”

  Dulcy picked herself up off the floor. Walton, who’d never been good with punch lines, had managed to remember the quote, but not what had happened after the sherry.

  “I don’t drink,” said the doctor. “And you’ve been dead on your feet for years. Try to meet the end with some relief.”

  At four a.m., Dulcy opened her eyes. Victor was sitting in a chair by her bed with his head in his hands. She shut her eyes again and pretended to sleep. When she heard him leave, she locked the door, though she knew she’d done this before; he had a key. Now she wedged the chair he’d been sitting in under the knob. She stared at the door into Walton’s room, but it was hinged out, and there was no way to block it. She doubted it mattered: Victor had never entered Walton’s bedroom, and she thought he never would.

  •••

  Walton said the seizure was a mild thing, a shit burlesque . He wrote a succinct note.

  Dear Dr. Dagglesby:

  Your suggestions for my treatment are ludicrous and outdated. Finer doctors on several continents have elaborated on the flaws in these techniques. Your comments that I have reached a “nadir,” and that this is my “final struggle,” are equally misplaced. I feel quite well, and believe my recent troubles might be put down to the effort of a Pacific voyage and adulterated medication. That having been said, I appreciate your brevity, and your personal bravery in making these statements to my face.

  W. Remfrey (as dictated to my daughter, Miss Leda Remfrey)

  Walton managed outrage in the letter, but once he’d finished dictating, he curled onto his side and shut
his eyes. “Would you like to talk, Dad?”

  “No, dear. I would rather not even think.”

  Dulcy left him alone. It was a strange, warm day. Victor was in the gymnasium again—tadoom , tadoom , tadoom , a tribal drum from the world’s least primal human. Henning would be with him, trying to talk his employer through the end of things; she’d heard some of it at breakfast. If Victor sold the newspaper, and one of the hotels, they might slide through.

  “I don’t want to sell,” said Victor. He’d acted as if nothing had happened the night before, but she knew he was no sleepwalker. He stirred spoon after spoon of sugar into his oatmeal. “I want to buy. I want to crack his skull open and pull the memory free.”

  Henning poured fresh coffee into Dulcy’s cup. She watched the liquid, not his face.

  “You and I will go out tonight, Hen,” said Victor.

  They wouldn’t bother following her through the city that day. Dulcy wrapped up and took the staff stairs all the way down. Fluttering leaves, seabirds, blue sky: she stopped at the pharmacy and a newsagent, studied shoes in a shop window, and eventually found herself in a pier restaurant with fish and chips and a beer, postponing a first effort at a telegram with a three-day-old New York Times . And there was Carrie, far down a society column:

  Mr. and Mrs. Philip Lorrimer of Philadelphia announce the engagement of their son, Alfred, to Miss Clarissa Remfrey of Westfield, New York. A wedding is planned for summer, after Miss Remfrey’s period of mourning for her late grandmother, Mrs. Elam Bliss (née Martha Wooster).

  Wise of her not to bother asking for Walton’s approval. Carrie loved this world, even though she was only attached by Martha’s threadbare family. Dulcy’s telegram would ruin all of this.

  C— Must come. No choice. You needn’t stay till the end.

  Dulcy scratched this out. She needed to take a firmer line.

  C— No chance of improvement. You must come now.

  She ordered a second beer and read items she never bothered with: business pages, household tips, politics, sporting columns. James Jeffries was considering retirement. Victor had taken Dulcy to a Jeffries bout during the last summer of their engagement; Jeffries had won against a New Zealander named Fitzsimmons while Dulcy held her fingers over her eyes, chugging champagne and queasy with the subtext: Victor had killed a boy, Stinson Vanderzee, in a boxing match at Princeton, and she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to see this. Vanderzee had officially died of nephritis six months later, but he’d been simpleminded after the fight, and everyone knew he’d drunk himself to death out of despair and befuddlement. But Victor watched the Jeffries fight like a child watches fireworks, and every day in Seattle he either pounded the big bag or the chauffeur. This was one task Henning, who coached from the side, flatly refused. “Have you ever practiced with him?” she’d asked once.

  “I used to. I began to dislike it.” Henning was good at letting a world float away, without explanation.

  Victor had no spots, no visible scars or unbalanced physical feature. During the Jeffries bout, he boasted that he’d never bled during a boxing match, which made her skin shimmy. A few minutes later, she managed, “But what about the boy?”

  “Oh, Vanderzee never bled,” said Victor. “He barely bruised. Who knows what really happened.”

  The problem of Victor, besides everything else: he wanted; he didn’t want. She tried again to remember how it might have been that she’d found him interesting, before the world had swiveled and stopped giving him what he wanted, before he killed another boy, before he sent his proxy to London after Dulcy, out of longing but primed for revenge. He had looks, and money, and what she had assumed was just an edge of the strange. She had enjoyed the way other women watched him, and she’d liked the fact that he paid such close attention to her without descending into sappiness or obvious, ardent manipulation. He was observant about politics and finance and things that didn’t include emotion. He read books, and when they’d talked about history and culture and countries, she only gradually realized he’d never see any of them, that he truly hated travel. He thought this would be no problem for Dulcy, who’d tired of tagging after her father around the globe.

  “But I love to travel,” said Dulcy. “I simply don’t want to travel with him anymore. I don’t want to have to take care of someone. I don’t want to have to worry.”

  “Well, then, I’ll do it,” said Victor. “I will do anything for you.”

  Victor believed in other types of activity: sit-ups, push-ups, pullups. He was a good tennis player, but any sport had to be planned out, nothing impromptu, variables limited. He would swim, but in a pool, not an ocean; he would walk, but not happily in tall grass. And he would box, wearing gloves: boxing had begun as therapy gone wrong. Touching another body, even in a game, was a struggle. He had wild urges and crawling skin; no one had worn his surfaces down. He needed a cocoon to muffle the world, and she guessed that he believed knowing her well would make key parts of life—her body, for instance—approachable. If his mother had been locked in a bin before he turned one, things might have been different, but Dulcy thought he’d been born this way. He could dust a kiss on her hair, touch her through cloth, but any moment of real contact was a little like a stabbing, an act of will, body over mind.

  She’d caught Victor reading romantic novels as how-to manuals, with palpable disbelief. There was always a tension between what he wanted and what he knew was expected. Above his desk, he’d pinned a handwritten quote from Lafcadio Hearn:

  Everyone has an inner life of his own, which no other eye can see, and the great secrets of which are never revealed, although occasionally when we create something beautiful, we betray a faint glimpse of it—sudden and brief, as of a door opening and shutting in the night.

  “Very private,” said Dulcy to her friends. She’d liked his intelligence and his obsessiveness and his looks, and it wasn’t as if she knew if the novels were right, anyway.

  •••

  On Thanksgiving, Emil drank and turned the turkey to leather. The potatoes had raw bits, the scalloped oysters were dotted with shell and sand, and the pumpkin pie was stringy and vegetal. Victor sent word to fire him, but a maid said that Emil had found out that morning that his brother was dying, crushed in a logging accident.

  Walton wondered if the falling tree had been a sequoia, and had perhaps been weakened by an earthquake. Could Emil afford a hearse, would Hearst write this up, was it all hearsay?

  Henning walked up to the market and returned with fresh Olympias and spot prawns. Dulcy found butter, and a wizened lemon, but there was no bread in the kitchen, no greens, no fruit. They all drank too much, even Victor, who headed into his office to have a fuddled, screaming telephone call with his parents in New York before he set off to charm his fiancée Verity and her family at dinner. Dulcy and Henning heard parts of the conversation while they leaned out the window, sharing another cigarette in the sleet.

  “Have you seen some of the crabs in the market?” asked Henning. “Three feet across, still moving. Sea spiders; nothing like this at home.”

  She shivered. Cigarettes made her feel terrible after the first puff or two. Walton had tried to tell her once that some of Henning’s side of the family had been wreckers who lured ships to the shoals, salvaged the cargo, and stripped passengers’ bodies of belongings.

  “And flat fish as big as Walton’s fattest nurse, with larger eyes.”

  He’d bought some herring, too, and they waited until Victor slammed off, then found another bottle of wine and tiptoed around the kitchen. She dusted the herring with flour and fried them and dressed them with raisins and sweet vinaigrette, as if they were sardines. Pickled herring by way of Sicily, she told Henning, who ate twice as much as she did while they drank brandy. They were playing gin at the kitchen table, dirty plates pushed to one side, when Victor returned, complaining of the alien smell.

&nb
sp; “I didn’t expect you to be here to be bothered,” said Dulcy. “I’ll rinse the plates when I’m done with this hand. Why was your dinner so short?”

  “I do not enjoy those people,” said Victor. He picked up Henning’s empty plate and smashed it on the floor.

  Dulcy fled to her room and turned her key in the door, wedged the chair, and then knelt next to it, listening, listing. The room spun from too much brandy, and she finally gave up the fight for balance and lay flat on her back on the carpet, listening to the footsteps in the hall. Pace, pace: she admired the dangling crystals of the light fixture above her, the novel nature of the bulb and its soft, yellow, fascinating glow—where had Victor gotten such a thing? She turned and watched the shadow of his steps pause near the doorsill.

  A second set of footsteps approached, Henning trying to fix the problem. “I know what I want,” said Victor.

  Well, no, thought Dulcy. No you don’t, not at all, no matter how often you say it.

  The key turned, a push against the chair. “You’re a fucking fool,” said Henning. “Go to sleep.”

  Winter (December 21 to March 20)

  December 22, 856, Persia, 200,000 dead.

  December 23 and 24, 1854, Honshu, 10,000.

  December 25, 1899, Palm Springs, 6.

  December 28, 893, Dvin, Armenia, 30,000.

  January 1, 1837, Galilee, 7,000.

  January 11, 1693, Catania, 60,000.

  January 14 and 16, and February 2, 1703, Apennines, 10,000. A southern progression!

  January 19, 749, The Levant. Complete destruction.

  January 23, 1556, Shansi, China, 800,000.

  January 25, 1348, Friuli, 10,000. Plague followed.

  January 26, 1531, Lisbon, 30,000.

  January 28, 1872, Shemakha, Caucasia (see 1667 and 1902). Large toll.

  February 2, 1428, Catalonia, 10,000.

  February 4, 1169, Sicily, 15,000.