The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  Walton and Woolcock disappeared for the mines to the north and left her in a world of ceiling fans and tropical flowers, days spent with little memory of anything between vanilla ices served by dark servants. She remembered watching the ice melt. Where had they found it? She couldn’t imagine. Great ships waiting in the harbor, blocks sunk in sawdust in the hull—still, nothing could have lasted so long in that heat. But she really did remember ice, and seeds from a vanilla pod, and Indian mangos that were as sweet as Martha’s peaches.

  Toward the end of the trip to Africa, she’d listened to the men blather deep into a night, more talk of gold and copper and cunny, claustrophobic glory dreams echoing down the hall to her hot room. Walton laughed about an adept English colonel’s wife, and Dulcy, trapped with these voices and the probable fate of the woman, left her bed for his room, where she drank most of his last half bottle of Armagnac and broke his seven thermometers one by one, pouring their contents out in a shimmery puddle on the top of his nicest shirt. He could take his mercury pure; he had to stop spreading the doom. She arranged the broken glass on the shirt, too, and walked across the compound to the nurse’s quiet, airy cottage, where she was given another vanilla ice (never as cold or delicious as the first) and put into a cot.

  Walton was attentive for the next two days, but by the time they left, he was back on himself, fretting about a relapse and muttering as the ship pulled away from the dunes about the copper he’d helped wrench out of the place, the diamonds and gold he was sure were under the sand of Namaqualand. This was his story, and he could only comprehend someone else’s life for an hour or two at a time. His mood sweetened when they landed in Sicily. He sent off a salvo of triumphant telegrams to Victor and trolled for beauty through the narrow alleys of Palermo, while Dulcy sketched Etna and ate through the menu of the Hotel du France.

  In June, in Salonica, they were greeted by Mehmet Akif, a banker Walton had met at a spa in Austria (Mr. Akif had suffered from a far more innocent disease) and done business with in Africa. Salonica was a perfect destination: earthquakes, ancient mines, and equally ancient medicinal springs. Mr. Akif’s family—Dönmeh with the huge brown eyes of Coptic mummy paintings—served cherry juice and sweet wine, lamb and octopus and olives. Dulcy tried to learn the Greek alphabet and swam badly—despite growing up a mile from the lake, no one had ever really taught her—while wearing a balloon-like muslin shift. She visited an open-air cinema with Akif’s daughters and avoided his sons’ stares during table tennis and billiards.

  The clinic was in the foothills. They shared a balcony, and when Walton wasn’t being dosed or plumbed, she usually found him forgetting the book in his hand, watching one of the maids cross the tile below. “What are you doing?” she asked one evening.

  “Well, Dulce, she’s quite lovely.”

  The maid had long cherry-colored hair and a tiny waist. “And all of sixteen.”

  “Twenty, and widowed.” The girl disappeared into a doorway. Walton waited for her to reemerge, a dog on point. It took years off his face.

  “You must be fair to others. You mustn’t ruin their lives.”

  “It’s important not to be judgmental, Dulcy.” His expression dared her to say more; she didn’t usually bother, since she’d given up her high moral stance. “I have my ways.”

  Walton’s ways—some of the time—were expensive sheaths; he liked to pretend she didn’t know about them, despite the fact that he’d instructed doctors to speak to her directly, despite the fact that she handled his affairs and paid all his accounts. He went inside to dress for the evening. Two joined dogs lay in the courtyard under an apricot tree. She watched them pant and avoid each other’s eyes, and her mood grew bleaker. Maybe she would run away.

  On the evening of July 1, they joined the Akif family in the shaded courtyard of the white-walled Hotel Leonidou near Apostolon Square. They ate cheese and eggplant, game and fish and fruit, paper-layered cakes of honey and nuts, while doves rustled in almond trees, people laughing in air that felt silky on the skin. Walton was in the midst of an elegant toast when Dulcy realized that her straw-colored glass of wine was sliding away from her. Walton paused. There was a sense that the air in the town was sucking inside itself, that the trees were shrinking and the tiles of the courtyard swelling. Then everything broke apart and shattered, and the family and their guests threw themselves under the long oak table while windows and plaster descended from the hotel above.

  The smell of dust, the beginning of smoke. The members of the dinner party stayed entwined under the table, all of them spackled with shattered glass and sticky wine. Dulcy’s ears made a grinding noise, like a boat sliding on a gravel bank, in the very momentary silence before someone began to scream. Marble dust settled onto her arm, and she watched the shadows of birds veering about in the last of the sun. A donkey brayed, and she thought of how they’d once come upon a half-dozen starving goats in Turkey, marooned from their flock by a quake slide. No one ever talked about the animals in newspaper accounts, but in fallen towns, she’d seen people weep while they listened for the sounds of trapped cats and dogs.

  The Hotel Leonidou had shifted two feet, but the pillars stood. A few blocks away, a pension had collapsed and caught fire, trapping and killing a group of Danish tourists.

  “We are very fortunate,” said Walton, later. This careful near-piety may have come out of the shock of seeing Mr. Akif drop to his knees and pray to the invisible new moon. When they returned to the clinic, they found the springs had cracked open, and the water had disappeared. Walton vanished, too, off with the caramel-haired girl, and when he was located, Dulcy herded him onto a ship bound for a fever clinic Mr. Akif had suggested, north of Naples.

  •••

  On January 17, 1905, while her old life rolled on toward St. Paul, Walton’s runaway daughter took the line west as far as Spokane, then changed to a Utah train at dawn. She wore her hair up to show diamond earrings above the red collar and blue dress, a blaze of color in a bleary morning. She sat with a nice woman named Lahey from Chicago and introduced herself as Anna Mendelson. She talked about visiting an aunt in Houston, about music (no, not those Mendelssohns, sadly), about the weather.

  Mrs. Lahey would remember “Anna,” who had brown eyes, dark brown hair, and a face and nose that had previously been described as long and English, as that nice Jewish girl heading home to California. Dulcy took a train to Pocatello, instead, then Omaha, where she spent a day writing and destroying apologies to Carrie. In the morning, she boarded a Topeka train, wearing a new wine-red dress.

  She left a ribbon of fibs across the West for eight more days. In scrubby towns, the hotels all seemed to have the same carpet, the same lurching Otis elevators and anxious guests. Dulcy lay on identical beds, watching cooks drag garbage down alleys, pale men leave Chinese basements or tiny apartments with polka-dotted curtains. Stray dogs, dirty snow, women walking alone, wearing black; every city was populated by an identical army of men in black bowlers and black suits. She began to have an eye for the strange as it blurred by: there would be one bright dress besides her own in every crowd, one misshapen face or body; the odd cow in every herd—a monolithic black Angus changing out a herd of scrubby longhorns, a Holstein or Jersey Sabine in a gang of orange Herefords—would be the only one that bothered to lift its head to watch the train pass. In Colorado, she saw a bear sit back on its haunches, taking a pause in a menu of train-splattered carrion. She saw many small children, alone. She saw no one she recognized, anywhere, but every other day, she glimpsed Walton from behind.

  She headed west to Denver and checked into the Brown Palace. She bought a plain gold ring, a shearling coat, a pretty blue tapestry purse, and black and mauve dresses to be tailored quickly, and she scanned newspapers while the order was tallied: two earthquakes on January 18, in the Caucasus and Veracruz. Walton would have maintained that the same great sucking gob of magma had caused both events.


  •••

  The shock of the first account of the missing Leda Remfrey, found in the late edition of the Omaha World Herald:

  The sisters Remfrey were accompanying the body from Seattle to New York. It is believed that the missing girl de parted the train between Miles City and Dickinson, though no witnesses admit to seeing her after Butte, when she stated she felt unwell. It is hoped that she became confused, and will be found in one of the towns along the Northern Pacific route, but though Miss Clarissa Remfrey denies that her sister was distraught following the death of their father, an official allows that evidence found in Miss Remfrey’s cabin—a lowered window, fabric caught in one corner—suggests that the poor girl flung herself from the train, to her certain death, her body lost to wolves on the prairie.

  This satisfied Dulcy, though she wished she could save Carrie and her aunts from the image. “Lost ” was fairly gentle; soon vultures would pluck her eyes out, which was better than Victor finding her and doing the same thing. She ordered a tray, put a quiet sign on her door, drank most of a bottle of Corton-Charlemagne, and lay in the bathtub, adjusting the temperature with her toes. She dripped water across the room and stood naked at the window, at least for a moment. She danced, she lounged on the chaise and the bed, she played with herself, she felt some self-disgust but finished the wine.

  She flipped through the newspapers and scribbled down ideas on the hotel notepad. She didn’t want a tinny name.

  •••

  The snow began in earnest, weighing down the hotel awnings. It fell too quickly to be colored black by coal and wood smoke, but at night all the frozen dust combined with streetlights to turn the city a glowing rotten lilac. The staff muttered about train delays, guests who were unable to leave, guests who failed to arrive. The bar and restaurant downstairs grew louder, and the room-service menu slid inexorably from shellfish and salads toward beef and potatoes.

  On the third day, when the trains stopped entirely, the doormen looked at her in disbelief as she headed out: to a bookstore, to keep from losing her mind; to a stationer to have calling cards and notepaper and luggage tags printed. At the last moment she had the initial D inserted, then tried to beat down her panic as she floundered on to a picture show. Cleopatra, staged with midget pyramids and a bantam Marc Antony, palm fronds everywhere—she sat there, befuddled in a miasma of clove cigarettes, and wondered at people who seemed to believe a chubby woman in a horsehair wig had something to do with Egypt. Henning would never have inflicted such crap upon the world.

  The suicidal Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey continued to appear in the newspapers, but her middle names were rarely mentioned. In a week-old New York Tribune, Dulcy found the photograph she’d dreaded on an inside illustrated page. Her hair was flossy and long, body skinny inside a jumper. She had not yet grown into her nose. The Remfreys had gathered, even the Boys—tall and fake-grim like Walton—because Dulcy and Walton had been about to leave for Mexico, to see his brother, Christopher, in Pachuca, a city that managed to combine agave and copper and white Cornish houses. It had been her first true trip.

  There are two dueling theories. The first, whispered by friends of Mr. Maslingen’s parents in New York, is that Miss Remfrey had always been unstable and eccentric, a tendency that strengthened during her strange, unchaperoned jaunts with her father. How else to explain the way she broke things off with Mr. Maslingen years ago? These people suggest that she is somewhere in the West, having now utterly lost her already eccentric mind; they also deny that Mr. Maslingen had again proposed.

  The second theory is that she quite deliberately committed suicide, in despair, despite her renewed engagement with Mr. Maslingen. This rumor comes from Seattle, from people who have recently seen the man himself: he is unstrung with love and claims that only death would keep them apart. He vows to search until he finds her body; he has hired teams of detectives to scour the country.

  Why would she think she could hide? He would kill her if she didn’t kill herself: why wait, in dread? Some things were not survivable. All the adrenaline—whatever fear and love that had gotten her through Seattle, Walton falling, Victor, and her own flight—evaporated.

  That evening, after more spendthrift wine, Dulcy dressed carefully and walked into the hotel’s balconied hall, open to the lobby seven stories below. The irony of the floor had not passed her by, and the stained-glass roof was almost close enough to touch. She leaned out over the balcony, and her breasts started to slide out of her dress at the same time as a child ran across the floor far below, and a table of men happened to look up.

  Poor people. No one but her had seen Walton hit, and the people who craned in afterward deserved the image that lodged in their brains, a man whose body looked like a badly judged pressing, a flower too thick-petaled and moist to be preserved. She pulled back, woozy and abashed. If she could have walked off a train during a warm storm and been incinerated by lightning, she might have managed it, but there was no way around leaving a mess.

  And in the morning, despite a hangover, Dulcy found she didn’t want to die. She emptied one of Walton’s two Denver bank boxes—two keys, two imagined names in two different handwriting styles—stuffed her old clothes into a church charity bin, and headed north to Billings, an arbitrary choice, under one final, sentimental name: Martha Wooster. She’d steamed her face, scrubbed her mouth, taken some Walton pills, but her eyes still felt like they’d lost their curve, and her balance was off, and the people on this last train seemed to speak a foreign dialect.

  That afternoon, when the porters offered drinks, she was the only woman to accept. She told herself she didn’t care; she told herself that the young man sitting kitty-corner was worse off: he reached to his whiskey with a shaking hand but never quite brought it to his mouth. He had huge brown teary eyes, and between attempts at the drink, he used a Parker filigree pen—Walton would have killed for this pen—to fill pages with dense, crooked writing.

  At the ten-minute warning for Billings, she watched as he put the pen and paper down, belatedly drained his glass, and left the lounge car. A moment later, the train braked, and a woman began to scream, and Dulcy, blind to her book, understood. The people around her milled to the window and said well of course and anyone could see he was a drinker and bits of him everywhere—he dropped straight down. They’re still looking for pieces of that girl on the prairie. And: one wonders how many delays are due to people who do this to themselves? You can’t stop for every lunatic, but any lunatic can stop commerce.

  Suicides were inefficient; suicide was selfish: they’ll be sorry when I’m gone, rather than they’ll be better off without me. She roused herself and picked up the man’s papers and warm pen and sat in his warm seat while she waited for some sort of authority to fetch them. She hated these people: who were they to judge the difficulty of a leap, any leap, how hard it had been to stand between cars in the cold and noise, willing the end. When the conductor came through, looking for the man’s belongings, she held the papers away from her fellow passengers; it was none of their business.

  “Well, aren’t you a special lady,” said a woman in purple velvet.

  Aren’t I, thought Dulcy, who hadn’t handed over the pen; Walton wasn’t the only one with a fondness for strange talismans. When the train finally rolled again, and the fatuous turds around her stopped talking long enough to detrain in Billings, she decided she wouldn’t stay in this place. On the next westbound train, she kept her valise with her. The express followed the Yellowstone River upstream, barreling through a half-dozen scrawny towns. It slowed for Livingston in the failing light, and when she saw the railroad’s massive brick machine shops, she realized that this was the town with the champagne crowd and the boastful depot, the place she’d once stayed with Walton, the place where she’d stopped being herself. The buildings looked raw and wet in the just-lit streetlamps, and a group of children skittled down an alley. Perhaps five hundred hous
es, none very large: it surely wasn’t big enough, but she stood anyway, and walked off.

  Get your facts, first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

  —Mark Twain

  chapter 7

  Another Country

  •

  Walton, who managed to believe devoutly in the end of time without lending it a shred of religious significance, had come by his own revelations, and ultimately to the American West, in a salvo that began after he sailed out of Falmouth Harbor with Christopher in 1867. Walton was four months free of a six-year apprenticeship at the copper mines in Allihies, Ireland, and two months free of an engagement to a girl named Ellen, whom he hadn’t seen for three years. He’d returned to Cornwall from Ireland to find that she was dying of tuberculosis. She let him go gracefully, having greater concerns.

  The winter voyage to Veracruz took almost a month at the worst possible time of year, and when they reached the port, after they made their way between rows of Maximilian’s French soldiers, they were stunned by color and heat and smell; dizzy with rum and thick coffee, the strangeness of citrus and snapper and tamales and avocados. Walton could not adjust to the idea that the air could be wet and hot at the same time, outside of a mine. He drank too much and found the women’s houses near the harbor, while Christopher, during calm evenings in the arched courtyards and gardens near churches, talked to priests and gardeners, and worked on his Spanish. He began to enjoy chilies.

  They traveled south to Chagres and walked across the Isthmus. Bugs and greenery fascinated Christopher—he would happily have stayed in Veracruz for the rest of his life, muttering about the female shapes of orchids—and terrified Walton, who preferred his claustrophobic environments rocky and sterile. At the Pacific coast, they continued south to Chile to visit their friend Woolcock at the Cerro Blanco mines, landing at Valparaiso and moving back up the coast before crossing the Atacama. They passed evidence of ruined towns and of the tsunami that had hit far south thirty-three years earlier, after the earthquake Charles Darwin observed on February 20, 1835: