The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  She edged on toward the plums, gathering her skirt a little to make a pouch. She could eat, she was alive, she was everything this man would never be or touch again. She reached out to the tree and dropped a dozen plums into her skirt, then retreated. She’d made her way halfway back across the room when a peacock in the garden screamed. The man’s untouched eye flapped open, light blue and blind, then closed slowly. He hummed, a hurdy-gurdy sound.

  She reached the hall bench, dropping the plums into her bag just as a nurse came out of a room. Dulcy asked, in bad Italian, about the patients who never left their rooms: the man at the end of the hall, for instance. The nurse said that it was all terribly sad: Mr. Nash had been infected very young, and had drunk heavily instead of mounting an assault upon his disease; he had also been fond of hashish. He was a wealthy orphan, an unmarried only child whose account was administered by a London bank and whose relatives seemed untroubled by his accelerated demise and their eventual inheritance. He would not be mourned, and even when he’d been able to talk, in the first week after his arrival, he’d only instructed the staff to dose him for pain. If the mosquitoes worked, so be it.

  It was horrible, said the nurse, to have no family to sit with you, and to not mind the lack.

  •••

  When Walton did contract malaria, he suffered the consequent high fever, cramps, and pains; he poached and writhed and moaned, but his syphilis plodded on. When the cure’s failure was apparent, the staff used quinine to bring the malarial infection to heel, and it left Walton even more addled and temporarily deaf. He threatened to throw himself off the balcony one steamy night, and Dulcy pointed out that his room was only on the second floor, and above a little lily pond; he said he’d drown himself, then, and she explained that the water was only three feet deep. She told him he was the only one of five patients who’d checked in during July who was still alive. He stared at her for a moment and found his inner Protestant, his silent, suffering childhood self, and she reloaded the medicine chest for two diseases and a hundred symptoms.

  Enid Poliwood’s husband died at the clinic a week after Walton and Dulcy sailed away. A few months later Enid met a magazine publisher and remarried. She was very happy, and Dulcy had seen her twice more, the last time in Chicago, to congratulate her on her new husband, and her pregnancy, and her clear, almost unnerving happiness. Two months later, the pregnancy killed her, but Enid’s husband wrote to say that the stroke had happened before labor, before worry: She had walked into her kitchen and dropped, gone. No pain, no warning—a rock had fallen, the earth had opened up, and everything had stopped.

  Dishes Dulcy has learned to cook, listed on the occasion of her fifteenth birthday:

  Sauces: béarnaise and hollandaise, espagnole, velouté, tomato and cream reductions. Potpies and en croutes. All meats, all game in most forms (stews, sautés, and roasts, fresh and cured). Dumplings, noodles, puréed and rustic soups, eggs, breads, gratins, timbales. Fish whole and filleted, frogs’ legs fried or sauced. Potatoes, all forms. Vegetables, boiled or creamed or Italian style, fresh or pickled. Tomatoes, salads and slaws. Puddings, cookies, cakes, fools, pies, crumbles, soufflés.

  Dishes to refine:

  Shellfish bisques; pâtés and Wellingtons; dacquoises and other meringue-based desserts.

  Dishes that she feels aren’t worth the effort, or dishes that have failed, woefully:

  Layer cakes, candies, aspics, and ice cream desserts: baba au rhum, feuilletés, galantines.

  Dishes she would very much like to try, if she ever travels widely:

  Fresh scallops and snails, real curry, Italian dumplings, all manner of cheeses, mangos, Chinese things.

  Signed by Leda Cordelia Dulcinea Remfrey and Martha Maria Wooster Bliss, May 26, 1895

  chapter 11

  The Green Book’s Guide to Life

  •

  Dulcy hadn’t forgotten to eat since she was ten, the age when she’d begun trying to replicate the dishes she tasted during visits to New York. As her loopy childish penmanship gradually became tight and cryptic, she filled Walton’s discarded green notebook with recipes, mangled terms for French techniques, and souvenir menus. She didn’t weigh more than one hundred pounds until she was fourteen, but by then she’d worked through most of Miss Corson’s Practical American Cookery and Maria Parloa, and Martha helped her struggle through the cromesquis, cannelons, bressoles, and brissotins in Ranhoffer. On her sixteenth birthday, when she received The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, she copied down a quote from Ruskin:

  What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all fruits, and herbs, and balms, and spices—and of all that is healing, and sweet in fields, and groves, and savory in meats—it means carefulness, and inventiveness, and watchfulness, and willingness, and readiness of appliance. It means the economy of your great-grandmothers, and the science of modern chemists—it means much tasting, and no wasting—it means English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian hospitality.

  She had been very serious: she had been sure her life would include a huge garden and house, a half-dozen children, a trip to Europe every spring. Before that time, she would travel, and go to Vassar or Barnard, and have lovers and adventures. She’d have them after, too.

  Victor Maslingen, having sustained heavy losses in the African minerals market (he would be the only person to have lost money in that country, in the boom year since the end of the war) has returned from a brief funeral-going vacation in the Empire State, and now talks of selling the Butler Hotel instead of the Intelligencer. Our misfortune, and yours.

  — The Seattle General, February 11, 1905

  Dulcy stopped holding her breath whenever a train came through town, and she took the local to Bozeman on February 14, where she sent a telegram to Spokane. She made the trip again two days later and claimed Walton’s pine trunk, which had been held in Spokane under the name of Amelie Poliwood; the Spokane porter had done his job. Now she had the trunk carted to a side room in the freezing Bozeman freight depot, and she transferred Walton’s medicine box and the journals and the clothes she’d used to cushion them into a new valise, including two thin cotton dresses she’d inherited from Martha’s trousseau that she’d packed in case she ended up taking Walton to a California or Arizona clinic. She left his clothes and coats and boots and mining talismans, his folder of published articles and reading glasses and shaving set, and tried to pack them as she had in Seattle, while Victor watched. The journals were a risk, but the Boys would probably assume they’d been left in Seattle; the Boys might never look inside. The trunk smelled of Walton in a good way, but he was miles away, years away, down to sounds and fragments. In the middle of the night he was a long novel, but in the light of the here and now he’d lost his edge, done the thing the dead do and begun to fade from feeling to thought. All the brutal, shitty, gravelly reality smoothed and silky, like the new notebook fabrics.

  She ripped off the forwarding name so that the original label was visible—Remfrey , 109 East 19th St., Manhattan —and when the porter reappeared, she tapped the address and tipped him a dollar. She checked the valise into a locker at the station and waited at the library until after the shift change, when she reclaimed the valise and rode back to Livingston. When she climbed off she thought of how pretty the town was when the light was clear, of how she wanted to stay and not board another train for a long time.

  At the Elite (which he called the Eee-light), Irving lugged the valise up the stairs, while Dulcy dodged looks from Eugenia and Irina. Alone in her room, she lifted out the medicine box and removed the dozen journals, one by one. Garnet theories, egg yolk cures, red carnage, rose pink love. She opened the peach My Family and Life for the photographs: a formal portrait of young Walton with Woolcock and Christopher in Chile; Walton’s dead first wife, Jane, deeply re
ligious but with a sensual, Spanish face; Philomela, primped and young and too ethereal for anyone’s good. Walton had saved snapshots of his children by the 19th Street stoop; Martha in the kitchen with Dulcy on a stool, stirring a pot (apple butter, Dulcy thought); the girls and a spaniel named Harry wading in Lake Erie. The travel photos were a mix of shattered masonry, pretty nurses, and Dulcy posing before a variety of backdrops: on-deck lifeboats, a tumbled pyramid, a seawall, a coolie, mountains, the sea, a trained bear, trains. She did not always look clean or well fed, but she had been happy.

  In the green book, Walton, who’d written Walton Joseph Remfrey, Transvaal on every other new flyleaf, had done her the gift of entering just Dulcy’s Book here—no date, no family name or location. It began with the pages Walton had filled before Dulcy had taken it over: a skirmish with horticulture when he’d first visited Westfield, notes on the possibility of growing coffee or tea in northern Oregon or opium poppies in Montana, where the climate was similar to Afghanistan.

  Dulcy’s era began with recipes—everything from session pie to chop suey (she’d crossed it out after it proved to taste nothing like Chinatown)—and a first menu from Sherry’s on her birthday in 1894 (huitres et caviar Russe, selle d’agneau de lait avec sauce Colbert, glaces des fantaisies). The next menu came from the ship home from India, a simple English typescript with innocuous descriptions like poached chicken and green beans in cream that had meant dishes howling with small vicious green chilies, thick coconut milk, mysterious salted fishes, toasted yellow pastes and nuts and a soapy, strange parsley. A third menu was from the Savoy during an early, happier stay in London. The meal had been caviar-laden but very simple, perfectly balanced, and Dulcy drove Martha batty trying to re-create the salade Duse when she returned. She began to eye the leghorn chicks, weighing the advantages of caponhood against the disadvantage of not knowing how to get the job done.

  She’d never written down thoughts or a record of her day; she didn’t see the point, especially now, since she tended to change her mind, and the world changed around her, and who was she writing it for, anyway, since she was dead? But she was possibly disingenuous, or simply disorganized. She’d pasted down letters, corsages and theater tickets, bits of ribbon and Brownie snapshots, lists—Italian verbs, rose varieties, addresses—in lieu of memories. She still had Victor’s calling card from the morning after they met in 1900. Before, destroying it would have meant everything had been a loss, no matter how pompous the card looked, no matter how vicious the memories:

  Victor Bouwer Maslingen

  The Braeburn, New York, Ph. Br 129

  Now she ripped it into tiny spiteful pieces, turned to the new end sheet in the front of the green book, and added Penelope Maria Dulcinea Nash to Walton’s inscription. The married name, without the mourning, using the pen that had belonged to the suicide from the train. It felt right; she was a pragmatic widow.

  She pulled the medicine box from the valise, fifteen pounds of glass and wood and poison. She took out a dozen vials and dumped the most toxic and least useful in a small wastebasket. Pink pills, mustard-colored pills, horse-choking lumps that looked like they’d been made from ashes and hay—she scraped Walton’s name from the labels. She lined up the liquids she wanted to throw down the sink, then had a vision of killing all the fish in the river, of poisoning the livery horses pastured just downstream from the town’s new sewer. She put the liquids back, even the arsenic, but the bottle of ipecac wouldn’t fit flat, and she reached gingerly into the narrow slot to see what was in the way. She felt a pebble, too small to be another Goa stone, too heavy to be a magic lump of ambergris. She stretched her finger and tried to drag it up the velvet-lined slot, and on the third attempt she retrieved a lumpy marble-sized rock, rough and opaque on one side, icy gray on the other. She carried it to the sink and made a tentative scratch on the enamel; she took off her mother’s diamond ring—now her wedding ring from Edgar Nash—and tried it against the pea’s translucent side.

  Walton the packrat, bringing an uncut diamond home, an expensive token of the last trip to Africa. He’d probably looked for it in Seattle, not caught the rattle in the clatter of his glass vials, or maybe he’d forgotten it, along with everything else, by that time. She held the diamond up, but she was no judge, and she tucked it into the brocade bag with the bank keys, kept next to the Seattle money she hadn’t deposited. She rearranged the notebooks according to color—yellow to red; red to pink to blues and black—but she was sizing them as well. They were too bulky for a normal bank box, and she didn’t want to stand out by asking for an extra-large anything. She might not need to hide her own book, labeled with a nickname no one would know, but the others, signed Remfrey and damning, posed a problem, and she squeezed them into the new valise with the medicine box, tucked the valise inside the larger bag from Denver, and slid the lot to the end of her bed. She threw a traveling rug on top, then one of Mrs. Knox’s comforters, then a stack of library books, sliding them into a pattern she’d remember. Irina was a nosy girl.

  At dinner, Dulcy looked over the Elite’s menu—bad pork and fried potatoes or fishy gray cream sauces over suspicious chicken, all served with variations on tinned peas or corn—and gave up the delusion that she could live in a hotel. This was Livingston’s nicest restaurant, and no one cared that the food tasted like sawdust and pickles and rancid fat. She pushed a horseshoe of gray gristle—perhaps a literal horseshoe—around the plate, watching the sauce ridge and fail to relax again in a natural fashion. She was starving to death, melting away, beginning to look like a consumptive or a real widow. She needed a kitchen.

  •••

  And so Dulcy looked around with a clearer mind, trying to decide what, given the wind, made this place worth keeping. The brick downtown was flamboyant, the houses on the west and north side were sober and Protestant, the painted bungalows on the southeast smaller and Catholic and immigrant. The grocers were either Italian or Czech, and the bar owners were German or Irish, but no one but the French owner of the burned cigar factory seemed to be truly rich. There were far more taverns in town than churches. The owner of the best wine and tobacco store was Jewish, and there was a kosher butcher on Lewis Street, though no temple. A dozen Chinese, a single Persian couple, a handful of real gypsies, a dozen blacks who’d mostly moved up from Texas with the big ranchers. Members of the local tribe, the Crow, were largely invisible. Most of the clear-cut prostitutes lived on B Street, but a large middle ground of compliant maids and sales girls lived in the rooming houses on Clark and Lewis. Rusalka lived there, above a storefront advertising a fortune-teller who charged astronomical prices, and Dulcy wondered if people were willing to pay so much because of the sudden-death way men made a living out here, mining and dodging trains and trees and errant cattle. Walton, Man of Science, had loved having his palm read, but Dulcy had always assumed there was more to the arrangement than palms.

  The point of the game was to pick the most livable house on every block (not unlike a menu, the best blouse on a catalogue page, the most interesting man on a train). The old farmhouses on the east side were too close to the prostitutes’ cribs on B Street, a stone place with pretty windows on Yellowstone was too public, a stucco on Third was downwind from a laundry. On South Eighth Street she studied a yellow two-story frame house that sat on the high point of a long clearing—a garden-sized clearing—that faced south to the mountains and river. There was a cart in the yard, and an open door; someone was probably unpacking, and her life felt mistimed.

  But she persisted. The temperature rose to a heady forty degrees, and the slush that had seemed to melt away proved to be held in suspension by the clay of the streets, which took on the look of bad pâté, pink slime whipped together with cow and horse shit. During a sleet storm, an algae-green lather formed. Half the sidewalks were still only warped boards, now glazed with slick clay, and little old ladies slid backward regularly into the street mud, umbrellas upright. Some joker ma
de a small fortune using a sleigh to take travelers from the depot to the hotels. When Dulcy stepped off the warped boards of the sidewalk on the fourth day of thaw, one leg simply disappeared into the muck; the photographer Siegfried Durr helped pry her out, an intimate act that was apparently customary in the town.

  Durr walked her to Thompsons to buy new boots. He was handsome, but his eyes were a little too open. “When will the mud dry?” she asked.

  “When the temperature hits ninety. Then it turns to rock,” said Durr, watching Thompson lace her up. “Other than that, I highly recommend the town.”

  Dulcy made her way back to the house on Eighth Street and found the cart in the yard had been replaced with a sale sign. She stood tiptoe near the wraparound porch, but she was too short to see anything beyond a dangling electric light. The foundation seemed sturdy, and an old poplar at the gate barricaded it from the only other house on the block, where a man had begun to yell—useless dirty woman eggs with feathers lick them off. God dear God how could you have created her.

  She scurried around to the far side and sat on the steps next to a withered grapevine while the roar next door continued. A handful of scraggly gooseberry bushes ran along a low wall that marked the drop-off to the river bottom, next to a ruined shed. She walked down and scuffed the soil, the same pale clay that had sucked her boots off downtown. She looked up at an osprey nest in a bottomland cottonwood, down at willow and dogwood and paths snaking through the Fleshman Creek marshes and ruined beaver dams to the river.