The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  A pause—they didn’t know Dulcy well enough to do more than dabble in the risqué, and perhaps it was shallow to discuss misbehavior rather than death. Eugenia Knox struck out for a fresh topic—where had Dulcy taken her husband while trying to cure his illness?

  Margaret Mallow squirmed in the only gap of light. “Our last stop was in Santa Barbara,” said Dulcy. “An excellent place, but visited far too late. Forgive me, Eugenia, but I don’t know—are you a widow, too?”

  “Oh no!” said Eugenia. “Drop the thought ! Errol travels the West. We have too many investments, and very little time together.” She gestured toward a shelf with two photos of a slight, balding man. “Perhaps you would allow us to see a photograph of your late husband.”

  “I’ve put them away,” said Dulcy. “They hurt me, and I keep Edgar in my mind’s eye.”

  Their faces pinched in sympathy. Dulcy felt she said too little, too much. She didn’t want to be sucked into this world, but she knew that loneliness was liquid, and she was drowning. Sometimes she had the sense that she was tipping off the earth, that she could feel it spin. Her moments of elation, her sense that she could escape alive, would falter.

  And so during the day, she kept walking, despite the fact that sniveling out-of-doors left a frozen shellac on her face. At night, her ghosts marched in, but with Walton, she never had the classic sense of shock each morning, the cloudy “Is he really dead?” feeling she’d had after her mother or Martha. She didn’t half forget, or expect him to walk through a room, or think she should send a letter, or wonder what he’d like for his birthday. Watching someone hit the ground at high speed erased the typical confusion. Walton was extremely dead.

  Her windows faced south and east and took in the strip of shops on Second down to Lewis Street, the corner of Callender and Second, where businessmen met to gossip, and the alley behind the Masonic Temple and the theater, packed with tavern backdoors and three Chinese storefronts: a noodle shop, an apothecary, and a laundry. Only two of the Chinese men in town had wives, according to Eugenia Knox, but the resulting six children ricocheted around the alley, little golems in quilted winter clothing, delivering drugs, food, and laundry, chasing each other around carts and napping drunks, sliding on frozen puddles. Samuel Peake, who looked forlorn when he was alone, used the alley to cut between the Enterprise and the courthouse. Irving, who had clearly been dropped on his head as a child, smoked there on every break, hopping up and down in his own cloud of warm, tubercular smoke.

  At night, everything took a shift to the strange. Dulcy saw it all through the net of electric lines and telegraph lines, cables plugged into every downtown building. Once she saw a wagon roll past with two caged men in back, fingers curled around the bars like zoo animals while a policeman on horseback poked at them with a stick. Irving explained that the cage was the open-air jail for a town to the north; often the police found it easier to bring the whole problem to the county seat.

  No one seemed to pay attention to the cage. But the following week, when there was a fire half a block down the street, flames shooting up several stories in the windless cold, the sidewalks filled. Irving told her it was a cigar factory, and though she thought he had to be insane, this far away from Cuba, when she opened her window—for just a moment, in the bitter cold—her room filled with the rich brown of tobacco. She could see firemen trying to knock ice out of their hoses and hear the crowd ooh and aah. She wondered if the fire might spread and if she should be worried. When the water-wagon horses started to snort below her window, she thought sparks had traveled, then saw that what had upset them was a new wagon pulling up, wolf and coyote pelts topped with two dead mountain lions. They looked alive in the firelight, and the trapper in the wagon drank from a bottle while he watched the tobacco burn.

  She began to recognize the same handful of women at a tavern back door, and one night a chubby girl was folded facedown in the gap by a coal bin, her skirts hiked, one man holding her down while another pummeled her from behind. Dulcy had pulled on her robe, wondering what sort of reception she’d get from Irina if she said someone needed to be saved, then saw a policeman approach. But they all talked: the first man finished, and the officer opened his pants and started in, and when he threw his head back, she recognized Gerald Fenoways’ little brother, Hubert.

  The Fenoways: the brothers were everywhere. Dulcy heard their mother was dying, and she saw the woman once, eating at the Elite with her sons. Her skull pushed at her skin, and her eyes were pools of pain, huge black pupils on a yellow background. She looked like a piece of muslin, but her face and voice cracked with rage between raspy gulps of air; she glared at her sons with inky, red-rimmed eyes, and they drank and wept. Marriage, she hissed; Dulcy wasn’t sure if Gerry was supposed to repair his, or if Hubie Fenoways was supposed to find a bride. That night she heard Gerry in the hallway, drunk, pounding on doors and screaming for his aunt Eugenia to let him in to her apartment.

  Siegfried Durr’s newly built studio was kitty-corner to her room, with a glass roof that was still shiny and clear on the north side of its second floor, and Dulcy watched him fumble with his lock each morning and evening. Carefully dressed people filed in and out all day long, and sometimes she’d see the explosion of a bulb through the glass roof when he worked into the night. Once she saw a couple carrying a baby’s coffin inside. A flash of light, and they left again with their box.

  When I say I was committed to pleasure, I do not mean “pleasure ” as an abstract notion. I hoped to be loved as often and as well as possible, but entirely on my own terms, and only when the mood struck. I was no different than most bachelors (or married men) in that respect. I wanted amusement, and after I’d been amused, I wanted my own company. If any one tells you otherwise, they likely lie. On waking most mornings, I knew I deserved condemnation; around midnight, I couldn’t be bothered.

  Miss Dalgliesh told me it should be otherwise, and made her case convincingly, and we were engaged. Within an hour, as the wine faded, I felt a new cold liquid in my veins like mercury: panic.

  I left for Cuba a week later.

  —Maximillian Cope, A History of a Small War

  chapter 10

  Every Widow is a Love Story

  •

  The story of the newly arrived Widow Nash, as discussed in her absence by the members of the Sacajawea Club during a meeting at the new Carnegie Library, in Livingston, on February 15, 1905:

  The husband’s Christian name had been Edgar. He’d been born in London to an English father and an American mother, orphaned in India and schooled in England. Mrs. Knox was quite sure his middle name had been Walter. He had been tall and blond and Anglican, had come to New York as a young man, and had volunteered for the Cuban war immediately. Abigail Tate imagined he’d served in Astor’s contingent.

  “If he was English, why our war, and not Africa?” asked Mrs. Mallow, whose husband had enlisted in 1898, though he hadn’t gone overseas. “And if he was wealthy, why fight at all?”

  Eugenia Knox shrugged—she’d told them all she knew. Edgar W. and Penelope Maria Dulcinea Nash, née King, had met in New York, but married in London, and lived there for most of their marriage. (The whole notion of living in London was transcendently interesting during a Montana winter.) Maria Nash had little of her own live family, had never been close to her husband’s, and was comfortable with solitude. She’d come to town virtually empty-handed, despite her good clothing and untroubled allowance. She said she did not want reminders of her past, and of course most of her good dresses would have to wait until after a period of mourning, but the Sacajaweas agreed it still made no sense.

  Mr. Nash had fallen sick soon after he arrived in Cuba—yellow fever? malaria?—and spent much of his subsequent time at sanatoriums. “Did they marry before he was sick, or later?” asked Mrs. Macalester, the club’s president. She was married to the youngest doctor in town; she had a certain bloom.
“And why no children?”

  No one knew. However the war had dented Edgar Nash, the mortal issue didn’t seem to have been a wound, or fever, or any tropical ailment. The consensus was tuberculosis. The ladies had been given the impression of a long dwindling, though a minority clung to the gorier diagnosis of cancer. Mrs. Nash had mentioned visiting a clinic in the area; the ladies reasoned the clinic at Eve’s Spring, but that led them back to a brain tumor.

  Whether Edgar Nash had dwindled or gone out screaming, he’d been quite young—thirty, thirty-two—and any fool could imagine just how awful it had been before his body had been put on a boat to London. Most agreed Maria Nash was in a state of shock, so bereft, so literally at a loss, that she could only drift in her own thoughts and take long, silent walks. Abigail Tate, a widow herself (her husband, a deputy, had been shot by a drunken miner), said she recognized the foggy look of utter grief. Vinca Macalester said Mrs. Nash’s reticence was perfectly normal, and that she should be given time to find her way to a more social existence.

  “Is she reticent, or cold?” asked Mrs. Whittlesby.

  “She’s comfortable with keeping her grief in her own head,” said Margaret Mallow, not looking up from labeling circulation cards. “She has quite a sense of humor. And she reads.”

  “I’d like to know why she came here to begin with,” said Mrs. Whittlesby, who didn’t read. “If she does not want to be thought a snob, she should consider a greater degree of honesty.” Mrs. Whittlesby had this opinion of everyone who didn’t kiss up. Mrs. Nash’s refusal to confide, to provide tears or a verbal wallow, drove Mrs. Whittlesby into small fits of hysteria. She had been born talking, and silence terrified her.

  •••

  Dulcy had seen the real Edgar Nash in August of 1902, at the fever clinic near Terracina, on the coast between Rome and Naples. Fever clinics were a novel cure based on the observation that several men who had suffered from syphilis in the tropics, in India and the Congo and Manila, had managed a miraculous recovery after a bout of high malarial fever. This clinic was one of only three, and it sat on the edge of the infamous Pontine Marshes: men with tertiary syphilis were offered up to clouds of infected mosquitoes.

  Walton’s symptoms—hysteria, a rash on one arm, an open sore on his leg, an aching spine, an aching liver, a fading in one eye—made malaria seem like the better disease. He joked about mixing some gin with his quinine and looked forward to life again. He loved lava-filled Campania and Lazio: earthquakes, volcanoes, refined physicians, ancient history, good food—all the area lacked was a profitable mine. He and Dulcy toured Pompeii and Herculaneum, the gassy moonscape of Campi Flegrei, where the fumaroles reminded Walton of Yellowstone. They walked through the tunnel between Cumae and Sibyl’s grotto near Averno, and picked fruit from a fig tree that grew upside down from the rock at the entrance. The Romans had claimed the lake was the entrance to Hades—Aeneas had descended into the underworld here—and believed that the fumes rising from the volcanic lake killed birds. Dulcy couldn’t recall seeing a bird anywhere in Italy, and had heard that they’d all been eaten.

  After a week of tourism, they headed north. The driver swathed everyone in netting a mile before they reached the clinic, a pretty yellow villa with high windows and curvy nurses; Walton almost capered, but his enthusiasm withered within hours. He’d wondered over the genius strangeness of the fever concept and the fact that he would be allowed to wander outside like a normal human, but the true nature of the cure—the downside of being encouraged to drink, and eat, and take walks in the open air—involved being offered up to a marsh of buzzing, biting mosquitoes. Walton howled like a child, and the clinic doctor, saying this was a common reaction as patients became accustomed to insect bites, gave him sticky fortified wine, to sweeten his blood even more.

  Visitors had to be swathed in netting, and because so much time was spent on intimate digestive complications, the patients’ families were encouraged to spend the curative period at other hotels. When Dulcy announced her departure, Walton wept and raged and tore at his sores. She relented and was given a screened room with a view of an unpleasant green pond. She brought a stack of books to Walton’s room and read them aloud stoically, cocooned in netting, while he tossed around his still-drab notebooks. She would be there, but she would not listen; he said she did him no good, but he wouldn’t let her leave.

  On the third evening, Walton went missing from the ward and was caught hours later in the guest wing, rutting wildly with a fresh length of sheep gut dangling from what he sometimes called his instrument of doom. The woman was the elderly wife of another patient; Dulcy, listening to Walton whine in tune with insects, decided she might leave for the coast after all, if they could manage to bolt her father to his bed so that he didn’t kill someone besides himself. Walton was entirely out of her control, agreed the doctor, and he congratulated her on her pragmatism.

  Bully for me, she thought. She traveled to Gaeta with two women, Enid Poliwood, the young wife of a very advanced patient, and Amelie Nadsonova, a forty-year-old Russian who’d brought her mother, an ancient ballerina who had finally lost her balance to brain rot. Miss Nadsonova laughed about her mother’s sexual misdeeds and gave Dulcy and Enid French translations of Turgenev and Chekhov and Tolstoy. She smoked and had beautiful Parisian clothes; she talked about politics and novels, and she laughed about her lovers (real lovers) over wine and grappa.

  And so while Walton was being sucked dry at the jungle clinic, the three women took overnight trips to the mountain abbeys, to tombs and catacombs, to beautiful cave-lined beaches. They snickered at obscene frescoes and flipped starfish with bare toes, and in one marsh town they wandered around a drowned, ancient villa, where they’d been told they’d see the world’s loveliest clematis, a white montana, and some grapes planted in Nero’s time. Dulcy had never been to a more beautiful place; she would never see anything that could equal it. They passed the clematis without noticing it and ended up sitting on the massive stone heads of animals (a rhino, an elephant, a horse, an ox) at a fountain in the warm sun, while lizards scuttled around them and Miss Nadsonova talked about ways of avoiding babies. It was a moot point for Dulcy after London, but she enjoyed the knowledge, anyway.

  At the catacombs of Rome, she counted shinbones in one room, lace-dressed infant mummies in another cavern. It was horrible but soothing, this ancient and overwhelming death. Everybody died: in the presence of thousands of bones, any idiot had to acknowledge defeat. Dead Etruscans (nameless), dead Romans (Scipio and Agrippina), dead Christians (beyond number), and at the English cemetery, dead Anglo-Saxons (Keats and Shelley and Constance Fenimore).

  Enid Poliwood, who’d studied literature at university, began to weep. She was very tall, with a harsh laugh and a great mind, and spent much of the trip trying to talk Dulcy into rebellion. Dulcy would love college, even at this late date; she would get so much more from her future travels, and do so much better than the usual student in class because of the experiences she’d already enjoyed. Her self-reliance might even force Walton to be more competent. But Enid described herself as absolutely lost: not only married to a mess, but also possibly infected. Life was not as either woman had pictured it: Dulcy circled the topic of her misadventure, and Enid hinted that she’d had her own similar trial. One of the points of higher education was to meet people like oneself, to realize that these things happened all the time.

  •••

  On the day Dulcy saw Edgar Nash, she and Enid had gone to view gardens near Frascati, where cold and hot springs were routed through the orchards according to the season and the needs of the fruit. Palm trees and bougainvillea on one wall, white grapes on another, growing near espaliered lady apples. In the terraced garden area, an old woman peeled invisible scale insects off the citrus trees with a long ivory needle, following these individual murders with a perfume sprayer of alcohol spirits and water. They ate sardines and a chickpea cake and figs and drank
sharp white wine, then made their woozy way back to Gaeta.

  A nurse was waiting: Walton needed to see her; he’d had a difficult day. Dulcy wanted a bed, but she climbed into a carriage, put on her jungle gear, and plunged into the swarm. Walton was in the midst of being plumbed. She dropped her bag onto a bench and lingered in the hall, fixed on the notion of an empty room with an open bed. A breeze swirled down the long hall, thirty yards of marble and open windows. The air that day smelled of fruit and seawater and was nothing like a miasma, let alone mal aria, and she peered inside each doorway. If she made out a figure, she let her vision blur.

  None of the rooms proved to have an empty bed, but at the last one she stopped anyway. This room had a balcony framed with a jasmine vine and a laden plum tree. The fruit was dusky dark purple and looked as if it would taste better than anything she’d ever put in her mouth; she took a step closer and gave the still, sleeping figure in the bed a sidelong look. His head was tilted away, but otherwise he could have been a tomb effigy: a high forehead, folded hands, long legs straight under a thin sheet. The whole effect—the high ceiling, the flowers and heavy overripe fruit, the man on the bed in filtered light—reminded her of a painting or maybe, more ominously, of a fable. She took another step before she paused, thinking of how these fables usually ended, and turned to look again at the man on the bed. He was young, with curly blond hair, a long straight nose, full lips, dark eyebrows and lashes. Or singular: half of his face was perfect, a Botticelli, but the far side was gone, a pit loosely covered by a black bandage. A harlequin, with a slipped face: she could see the edge of what was hidden underneath, a pitted eye, a rim of dying skin.