The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  Dulcy headed out for Margaret’s house, where she was the second Sacajawea on the gossip circuit: Vinca Macalester had talked about a body arriving, and a mix-up, and mentioned X-rays with her husband’s new machine. She’d also passed on the news that Mrs. Fenoways had died the night before in horrible suffering, riddled and wracked by cancer while Gerry and Hubie howled at her bedside. The sons had been drinking since the morning; now they were waiting for the girl’s body at Hruza’s Cold Storage.

  Dulcy said she had errands in that direction; would Margaret go with her? Margaret would not; Margaret had an aversion to the Fenoways brothers.

  Which was only sane, but Dulcy had a compulsion to know the worst. She felt like her own body was arriving on the train. She bought two blouses at Thompson’s, a pair of spring shoes at A. W. Miles, a magazine at Sax and McCue’s, where a five-year-old boy flirted with her; every little thing helped. She stopped at Wong’s for the laundry she knew wasn’t ready yet, and she played tiddledywinks with another small boy propped on the counter between bales of linen while Joe Wong’s wife counted items. Through the laundry’s window she watched Durr and Falk march back and forth between the hotel and the studio two more times while Lewis sat on a bench in front of the studio, just one door down from the laundry, and read a magazine. When Samuel emerged from the newspaper office and waved to him, she followed.

  The Fenoways brothers were holding court at Hruza’s Cold Storage, moving in and out of the tavern next door while a boy ran back and forth between the telegraph office and this temporary police station to check on the status of the girl’s body. Dulcy, pretending to admire dresses through the window two doors down, smelled cold and woodchips from the open door. The crowd of men in Hruza’s anteroom stood in a fog of tobacco smoke, talking loudly about dead mothers. When she saw Durr come around the corner, Dulcy hurried into Winslow’s Grocery across the street, and Gerry Fenoways’ voice followed her like a wall. My mother’s fucking dead, and it’s Saturday; let’s get this thing into the beyond, send this little lassie back to her own home hell. You know this isn’t some effing maiden we’re discussing here—so young, but the bits seem quite used. And meanwhile none of you cunts give a shit about my poor bleeding mom.

  In Winslow’s, a nervous clerk followed her while Gerry howled on: at Durr to take his portrait and hurry the train, at Bixby to find that Swedish fuck. Dulcy fluttered in a circle, then said she needed to pick out things for her house, to be delivered later. Ten pounds of flour, ten pounds of sugar, coffee that had flavor... she nattered away while a boy took dictation and politely ignored repetitions.

  I could run faster than this fucking train. This girl fucked faster than this fucking train. Go ask again. “Doesn’t he know how to use the station telephone?” said Winslow, a twitchy man growing twitchier. He had a gray mustache that seemed wider than his bony face. Dulcy, ordering food she wouldn’t be able to taste for weeks, was beginning to be hungry, and she eyed casks of smoked and salted fish, Karkalay and Norway bloaters, Holland and kippered herring, anchovies and mackerel. She bought some smoked eel and was at the cash register when a new sound echoed across the street, someone singing. Everyone in the store walked to the front to see whatever this new noise meant.

  Che gelida manina,

  se la lasci riscaldar.

  Cercar che giova?

  Al buio non si trova.

  What a frozen little hand. Let me warm it for you. Such sensitivity: Hubie Fenoways, wiry and agitated, was bellowing out La bohème as he paced in the street. She’d heard that he styled himself an opera singer, and he really wasn’t that bad. Someone jeered, and called him a bagpipe, but he finished, and bowed, then rolled up his sleeves and started for the man. Bixby, who needed to find a saner line of work, held him back, but the mood changed: a delivery wagon with the coffin appeared, escorted by Lennart Falk. Hubie walked up to Falk and poked him—hard—in the chest.A voice whispered in her ear, Lewis: “Avoid those men, at all cost.”

  Samuel was next to him, gleeful. “The Fenoways are quite something, aren’t they?” he said. “They are their own opera.”

  Lewis took a second look at Dulcy. “Did this just happen?” he asked, pointing to her glasses. “Are you blind?”

  “I often use glasses,” she said. “And I’ve had headaches.”

  “You’re vain,” said Lewis. It made him happy, and she guessed they’d been drinking. “They make you seem very severe,” he said.

  “I am severe,” said Dulcy, who’d put effort into looking more like a widow that day.

  “You are lovely,” said Lewis. He nodded toward her purchase; the clerk was just tying the string. “With strange tastes. Eel, Mrs. Nash?”

  “Are you watching?” asked Samuel. “Mr. Falk would like to hit the younger Fenoways. He’s already had a hard day. He wasn’t looking forward to the girl, and the brothers Fenoways were making the most of the moment—”

  “Nasty little shits,” said Lewis. “Their mother should be relieved to be free.”

  Dulcy blinked, but Samuel rolled on: the body had been due to arrive from Billings early that morning, but the Billings morgue had loaded the wrong coffin. When they’d accompanied Lennart Falk to the back of the store at ten, they’d peered down at the body of a middle-aged suicide, an accountant who’d swallowed cyanide.

  “Worse than a hanging,” said Samuel, rubbing his eyes. “Worse than the girl when we saw her in Missoula a month ago, and I vomited on Lewis’s boots.”

  The Fenoways disappeared inside Hruza’s, and Lewis headed out. “Here we go again,” said Samuel.

  Dulcy fled.

  •••

  At six o’ clock, when Lennart Falk’s Elite door slammed, Dulcy listened to him talk to a presumably empty room. This was yet another thing that was her fault: if only he’d think it was the end of the story. But that poor dead girl without the right broken bone would still be dead, and Lennart Falk would begin looking for another brunette. Dulcy had almost managed to feel sympathy for everyone but herself when she heard a soft firm step in the hall. She braced herself for Irina’s questions, but the girl knocked softly on the door to the north. Dulcy vaulted off her bed to put an ear to the wall. She heard the click of Falk’s door, soft conversation, a salvo of giggles and soothing sounds, and within another sixty seconds the unmistakable wail and thump of a bed subjected to a full-blown rut.

  In novels, the heroine has never truly done anything wrong; in novels, heroines languish in their chamber indefinitely, sipping spring water. By eight, as Lennart Falk began to thump into Irina again, Dulcy had found and eaten all five crackers she’d stowed in her bag, as well as some pistachios left from the Butte trip. She cracked the door and smelled roast beef and sugar and shrill perfume, not the best mix.

  She shut the hall door quietly. Someone outside was making crooning noises, calling out, but the wind warbled the sound. The heat was pounding out, Eugenia catering to the nitwit again, and when she heard the crooning again, something very close to Maria , Dulcy lifted the window. A group looked back up at her, and Margaret gave an embarrassed wave.

  “Rapunzel,” said Lewis. “Take the stairs.”

  •••

  She should not have done it—this behavior was not bereaved—but the whole town seemed to be out, and no one would notice her. Within an hour, after whiskey cocktails at the Albemarle, she was tipsy enough to drop fully into the role of a worldly widow and admit what she’d heard in the hotel. Samuel covered his face, but one eye drooped. Margaret blushed, but Lewis only shrugged. “I imagine he needed to wind down,” he said, and explained that the photo Lennart Falk carried looked nothing like the bloated face of this dark-haired woman—a different nose, different cheekbones, different neck—

  “Hard to tell about the eyes,” said Samuel.

  “Stop it,” said Rex. He dropped his head.

  —and Falk had been sick, tho
ugh there was already vomit in the Hruza’s bucket. There was no matching the photo, but the girl Falk sought had broken a leg as a child, and Gerry sent a summons to James Macalester, and the doctor sent a summons back: his machine was not portable, whereas this body had been in constant motion for weeks. Gerry decreed that they could dispense with the coffin or the hearse, and he had his men use a delivery cart for the three-block trip from Hruza’s to the hospital, and so the town was treated to billowing sheets (the wind, again) and dead blue feet.

  The hospital was a Victorian labyrinth. Macalester kept specimens of amputations, growths, and fetuses, and Falk was sick to his stomach again. In the lull before the beginning of the long green crackle of the machine, while Macalester tinkered with the equipment, Gerry and his men made more bad jokes. The body was rolled into position (or part of the body: the woman had been sliced in half), and Hubie Fenoways did something and said something that made Falk retch one more time and swing at him.

  It took an hour for the image to resolve. Hubie left, and Samuel and Lewis took Falk and Rex out for another drink. This body’s legs had never been broken. Macalester had heard what Hubie had done, and Hubie would be fired, dead mother or no. Gerry couldn’t prevent it.

  “But what do you mean?” asked Margaret. “What did Hubert Fenoways do?”

  The men looked away, and Dulcy started to go hot at the hairline. Rex, who had been sick, too, buried his face in his hands, so that only his floppy forelock stuck out. Lewis finished his glass of water and pulled a notebook and a pen out of his pocket. He drew the outline of a woman, and then he drew slashes across the body.

  “This was how the body was cut up by the train or by a man,” said Lewis. “This is where Mr. Falk had been told to check for a broken leg. And this is where Hubie put his fingers.”

  Dulcy scraped a speechless Margaret off the bench and pushed her toward the door. “Who did he think she was?”

  “Wait for us, Maria,” said Lewis, pulling out his wallet. “Don’t do a runner.”

  “Leda Remfrey,” said Samuel. “You might have read about her back in January.”

  “No,” said Dulcy. “I probably wasn’t here yet, and I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “Sorry,” said Samuel. “Of course. The father had been a suicide, and the daughter might have run, might have jumped—”

  “Jumped,” said Lewis, dropping coins on the table. “Her fiancé was a renowned prick, the kind of man any sensible woman would escape.”

  No one had apparently ever said prick in front of Margaret, who buckled again. “I’ve been told she poisoned her father and stole one hundred thousand dollars,” said Rex.

  This came out in an elided blur. Rex tilted, and his pomaded head left an oil stain on the wallpaper. “Jumped,” said Lewis again. “The father was an eccentric in business with the fiancé, a newspaper man named Maslingen; the father came out of a window at the Butler in Seattle. He’d lost some money, but he didn’t bother sticking around to spend it, so perhaps it really was lost. There’s no evidence the daughter knew, either. Jumped.”

  “What about the poison rumor?”

  “I heard she saw him fall,” said Samuel. “So it does seem redundant. And I heard it was more money, but who knows? Everyone lies.”

  “I’m completely fuddled,” said Lewis. “I need to sleep.”

  At the Elite, Margaret curled up in a lobby chair, and Samuel promised to walk her home. They’d dragged Rex this far, and Samuel argued with Lewis: they couldn’t physically get him home, but they couldn’t in good conscience expose him to his mother’s wrath. As they started in on Irving—couldn’t he tuck Rex into a staff bunk?—Dulcy made for the stairs. She was dizzy, but some sense of self-preservation was intact, and she turned on the landing to see that Lewis was right behind her.

  “Do I make you nervous?”

  She grinned. “You know, you do.”

  Samuel was calling for him. “I’ll give you a head start,” said Lewis.

  Dulcy laughed and ran up, then slowed. The curtains at the end of the hall billowed away from Leonora Randall’s open door—Miss Randall, who loved her privacy and her heat. Dulcy walked slowly down and found that the curtains gusted inside the room, too, every window open over a mess. Leonora had three trunks—she’d traveled heavy, in the parlance of Irving—and the staff had muttered when she’d refused to have her things put away or the trunks removed, which made her rooms cluttered and hard to clean. Now someone had opened all three, and every drawer, shredded the upholstery, tossed all of it into a mound in the center of the room with the torn pages of the violet-laden scrapbook.

  Dulcy took a step over silverware and just missed a china shepherdess’s painted head, then slid on a pearl, one from a long, broken string. The bedroom floor, partly visible through a doorway, was dusted with feathers, as if someone had taken a knife to the pillows. This was rage, not a robbery. She paused before she managed to walk to the open window near the gutted sofa. The pavement had no body.

  Dulcy ran to the stair railing. Lewis looked up from helping Samuel and Irving with a jellied Rex. He smiled—she was calling his name from the mezzanine, after all—but his mouth drooped as he took in her expression. The tavern roared, sound working like bellows on the glass doors at either end of the lobby, and as Lewis dropped Rex with a bad bounce, the door at the end of the lobby blew open. Hubie Fenoways, no longer singing, crawled into the room with Lennart Falk behind, lashing him with Durr’s ebony-and-silver cane. It looped so quickly through the air Dulcy could hear it whistle over the crowd and Hubie’s screamed imprecations—duck-dicked motherfucker sardine bait buggering —and Lennart Falk switched to stabbing at him with the cane, spearing him until the shaft broke and stuck in the man’s jaw. Hubert crawled on, smashing into a glass case of tourist souvenirs, screaming fucker fucker fucker and choking on blood while the broken end of the cane wiggled in the air like a conductor’s baton.

  Lennart Falk lifted what was left of the cane, and Dulcy saw Lewis run toward him, swinging the elevator attendant’s stool. He brought it down in a slashing motion and knocked Falk to the floor. When Hubie turned to snarl, Lewis kicked him flat.

  •••

  Lennart Falk freely admitted to destroying Miss Randall’s room. “I am looking for a beautiful woman,” he said. “If she is not dead, she has stolen from my employer.”

  Beautiful —a small stab of pleasure, mixed with a recoil. Lennart had come to believe Miss Randall, though plain and skinny now, might be the confident woman he sought. His client was clear about the need to reclaim property.

  What property? He couldn’t say, or explain why his client might think Leda Remfrey was still alive. Samuel, who witnessed the interview, quoted other phrases like hunnerts of towwsants and ruint in love. Lennart had searched in Salt Lake and Denver and Omaha, then backtracked and moved along the northern line, asking questions in rooming houses and hotels from Spokane to Duluth. He had brothers who had the same task in New York, Chicago, San Francisco. He agreed that Miss Randall did not seem to be the thief he sought. He admitted to Bixby—Gerry Fenoways was dead drunk—that he had lost his mind after the stress of seeing the dead girl.

  “The scum police officer stuck his finger into her,” said Falk. “I protested, and he lied about what he’d done. But I walked away, I tried to be calm.”

  After the viewing and before the caning, Falk had telephoned Seattle, drunk a half bottle of whiskey on an empty stomach, and decided that his prey was indeed Miss Randall. He entered her room and lost any remaining control during his search.

  Then he made his way to the saloon, where Hubie was waking his dead mother or his dead job. Macalester had already marched to city hall to demand his firing, and Gerry had been so drunk, and so upset about their mother, that he waved a hand and let it happen. A rational man would have found a different bar, but Lennart wanted a drink, and while he watched
the bartender open a bottle of gin, Hubie let everyone know that Falk’s reaction to the body had been to throw up. Siegfried Durr told him to shut up, and most of the men in the tavern said anyone would have done the same, but Hubie kept cracking jokes, and Lennart Falk had three shots of gin—boom, boom, boom—while he listened to the merriment.

  “After Hubie has a few, he swells into a giant,” said Samuel. “Bloodlust sets in. His mind flames, his mouth opens. Mellifluous filth emerges.”

  Some of the filth: Hubie called Falk a cod-fucker and a fiordpaddler, and added lines about reindeer and Lapp women. Durr tried again to silence Fenoways, but it was too late: Falk drained a last gin, picked up Durr’s cane, and speared Hubie in one thigh—“gaffed him like a fish ”—then wiped the tip clean with the barman’s cloth. Hubie fled toward the door but managed a last insult: he said, in so many words, that the girl’s body had aroused the Swede. Falk surged toward him, stabbing at Hubie’s back, his legs, his retreating ass; as they broke into the lobby, he flicked off Durr as if he were a bug and sank the cane deep into Hubie’s jaw. The silver tip was still where a tooth used to be.

  Falk said he regretted having tossed around a nice young woman’s unmentionables. He did not regret what he’d done to Hubie Fenoways, but his employer would be happy to make reparations to everyone involved, despite his near financial ruin. Gerry finally left the Mint Saloon to arrest him, and the rumor was that he beat Falk for the next several hours until Bixby managed to lock the Swede in a cell and temporarily hide the key.

  •••

  “I don’t have anything to steal,” sobbed Miss Randall, when she and Eugenia returned from the theater at midnight. “Beyond my aunt’s necklace and earrings. And I did offer to give those back.”

  This was interesting. Dulcy, drunk and daubing at the girl’s tears, thought that maybe everyone had a dirty little secret; maybe Dulcy wasn’t alone in this world. She began to warm to poor, kleptomaniacal Miss Randall, until the girl added: “They don’t understand how cruel they were, how much I deserved some sort of present. Why would they send me away?”