The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  Dulcy, who had stumbled into crime, loathed her for her incompetence and greed and self-pity. Her dislike only deepened when she sobered up: the next day, she hated everything, right through coffee and lunch. Her head buzzed and her stomach dipped, and her suffering only ebbed with a larger terror, when Irving told her that Gerry Fenoways, who wanted revenge for his brother’s ouster and beating, had insisted that someone travel from Seattle bearing bail money, to personally escort Falk home.

  Dulcy made a show of using the telephone and took the train to Denver, telling Eugenia that she needed to meet her sister-in-law, who was en route from New York to Los Angeles. After a few days at the Melton—she didn’t dare return to the Brown Palace—Dulcy called Margaret, who was very proud of her recent purchase of a telephone, and said that an amazing man, so interesting, so strange looking had come to retrieve his brother Lennart. When Henning Falk had arrived late, he’d found the jail locked tight, no one on duty, and he’d eaten a late dinner with Samuel and Lewis. In the morning he met with Gerry Fenoways, handed over a bag of gold, then bundled his brother onto the next train, after visiting the body of the girl and giving Leonora Randall an up-and-down that had sent her weeping to her room.

  Dulcy came home. The next morning, a little man from Utah was ushered into Hruza’s and recognized his wife from a pattern of moles on the breasts.

  Fruit

  I have two apple orchards, one consisting of 150, the other 120 trees, principally grafted fruit: Roxbury Russet, R.I. Greening, Esopus Spitzenburg, Pearmain, Newtown Pippin, Baldwin, Black Gillyflower, Jonathan, Fall Pippin, Honey Heart, Swaar, Harvest, Priestly, &c.

  Peach trees, 52: Alberge Yellow, Morris White, Early Ann, Royal George, Early York, Early Crawford, Lemon Cling, &c. Pear trees, 39, including Belle, Barlett, Virgalieu, Swan’s Orange, Woodruff, Harvest, &c. Plum trees, 29, including Damson, Greengage, Yellow Egg, Mediterranean, Large Purple &c. Also 33 cherry trees: Tartarian, English, Florence, American Amber, Morelio, &c. 12 large Orange Quince bushes; Apricots, Isabella grapes, &c.

  The curculio has troubled my plums some seasons. The pear trees are affected by blight, which I fear will prove destructive; I know of no effectual preventive.

  From Transactions of the New York State Agricultural Society for the Year 1848, Elam Bliss’s response to the questionnaire about his farm in Westfield, Chautauqua County

  chapter 14

  A Glass House

  •

  This Elam Bliss had been Dulcy’s great-grandfather, and all of the trees except the blighted pears, immediately replaced, were still bearing fruit when she was a child in the house of his elderly son, another barrel-chested botanic obsessive. Dulcy had a list of everything that she and Martha had picked in the Westfield gardens tucked in the green book, and she looked at it now with a new eye. Pearmain and Baldwin, both cider apples, ripened too late for Montana. So did Spitzenberg and Black Gilliflower, a smoky, ribbed apple that had been one of Dulcy’s favorites, along with Swaar, rich and spicy and mottled green, the ugliest fruit in the orchard. Swan’s Orange had been Walton’s favorite pear, on his summer visits, but the Virgalieu pear, known these days as White Doyenne, had been far better.

  Martha, Elam’s daughter-in-law, had taught Dulcy to make a checkered tart with the damson and greengage plums, to make apple butter and chutney, and cider and brandies out of everything. Dulcy spent late summers with a face smeared by syrup from Moorpark apricots and mirabelles and mulberries, newer cherries like Black Republican and Bing, blackberries and raspberries and gooseberries the size of quail eggs from bushes with thorns like medieval spikes. Martha grew dessert and wine grapes, but Concord vines increasingly circled Westfield, as the Welch family bought up land for juice and Seder wine. Martha blamed the Welches for an onslaught of plant ailments, but the greatest enemy remained the curculio, a weevil. She’d send Dulcy and a spritzer of poison up into the trees in June, then back up in September with a hooked basket for the survivors. When she was especially annoyed with someone, usually Walton, she’d call him the weevil.

  •••

  Dulcy saw nothing like Elam’s orchards in Montana, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be attempted, on a smaller scale, in her own backyard. A week after Henning Falk retrieved his brother and disappeared again, she purchased a ruler, draughtsman’s paper, and good pencils at Sax & McCue, and spent an evening reading new gardening magazines and sketching.

  To order & start inside: tomatoes, peppers, aubergine, melons, artichokes

  To plant outside, April: lettuces, parsley, beets, carrots, turnips, celery, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, peas, onions, radishes, potatoes

  To plant when warm (last frost when?): beans, squash, cucumber, corn, cosmos, nasturtiums

  To order: fruit trees & berries

  The next morning she walked to the new house in another snowstorm, nothing soft and ethereal but a fat fog laced with crystals that stuck to her face and melted down her neck. She’d wanted to plan out terraced beds, but she couldn’t see more than ten feet, nor could she study the shade patterns or determine if any corner of the yard had soil that was any better than the center, where the wind had scoured enough snow away to show dead gray clay.

  Inside, progress: Dulcy had hired one non-Slovak, a painter and paper-hanger named Gustaf Goulliand recommended by the Sacajaweas, and chosen a buttery off-white except for the largest bedroom, for which she picked a sort of apricot, and the small library room, which became sea blue-gray-green, almost the same color as Walton’s travel notebook.

  Margaret described the former owner’s wife as likeable but odd. She’d hated the local climate—she’d emerged rarely, usually wearing a fur coat—and the white tiles were the result of her obsession with cleanliness. Margaret surmised that this fixation on soap and disease had led to the woman’s committal to a sanitarium in her home state. Dulcy knew the kind of institution, deceptively homey in its public rooms—lots of light and potted plants—but more like a hospital proper in the treatment areas, with gray marble walls and floors and nurses in love with their own starched uniforms, advertising quantities of grain and oxygen, baths, electricity, and Swedish movements. Walton would love the experience for a week, and then flee for dirt.

  “The view of the river depressed her,” said Margaret. They were on the porch a few days later, talking about what cane furniture to purchase, and Siegfried Durr was tromping on the ceiling above their heads, measuring for new upstairs windows.

  “But it’s beautiful,” said Dulcy, flummoxed. You could see rivers and mountains, sky, and none of the town. It stunned her: she’d bought the place without ever looking up and out.

  “She found it bleak; she was quite morbid. She said it was the same thing, every day.”

  “I can see feeling that way about the wallpaper,” said Dulcy. “But everything here is moving. The river, the wind and clouds and trees.”

  “I think she had the sense that the water was constantly disappearing,” said Margaret.

  As opposed to the goddamn wallpaper. Dulcy had her own bleak thoughts, watching Goulliand struggle with a steamer and a scraper, the shadow of purple roses holding on like a rotten body. “Should we give up on the idea of paint?”

  “No,” he said. He tended to grit his teeth. The hair and beard she’d initially assumed were gray were speckled with whitewash, and his nails were permanently copper green.

  “Can I do anything to make your life easier?”

  “You could leave the room, Mrs. Nash. I would suffer more comfortably if alone.”

  Margaret fled. Dulcy walked into her kitchen and slammed empty drawers on her way out to the side porch and her bag and downtown, where she could throw some money at the empty-drawer problem. She found Durr on a ladder and Margaret underneath, holding a putty pot. Three panes had been cracked when a plasterer swung wide with a board.

  “You’re a man of many talents,”
said Dulcy.

  “I am a man of two or three,” he said. He’d started a black beard, and he had a new cane tilted against the bench by her boots, silver clad with a blue glass ball at the end.

  He had all his weight on his left leg and was dangling his right on the ladder. “Did you hurt your leg falling from a window?”

  “From a horse, in the army. I crushed it, and that was the end of that.”

  “The army?”

  “The army,” said Durr.

  Margaret gave her a look; Dulcy had confessed to doubting Lewis’s story. The move from officer to glazier still didn’t make sense, but Dulcy had no right to inquire about anyone’s alternate history. She tried to look interested in flaking caulk on the other windows, until Durr felt the pressure to offer more information. “I learned glass from my father-in-law,” he said. “In Berlin. Ateliers, palm houses, solariums in clinics.”

  “Oh!” said Dulcy. “A wife!”

  “Dead, then,” said Durr. “And so I emigrated.” He started to climb down, but Margaret handed him another pane and gave him an expectant eye—please don’t stop. Durr elaborated: he’d been depressed, and he’d had a tendency to fight. He made his way from New York to Milwaukee and found a job repairing a studio for an old photographer from Hamburg, who’d known his wife’s family, and showed him how to use a camera. And then another fight, and a friend had come to retrieve him, and brought him here.

  “Since then I wanted to begin seeing it all fresh,” said Durr. He had a floaty way of looking at a person, half there and half anywhere else. Perhaps the other half always had to be sure nothing stray was headed for a pane of glass. During the story, he bent down to show them the dent on the crown of his head where a man had hit him with a metal bar (“a Silesian ”).

  “Fresh? Because of your grief?” He drew a perfect bead of caulk.

  “No, no. I used to be violent, very angry. Then it went badly, and when I woke I was different, and everything looked different, and all I wanted was to look very hard at things.”

  The idea of Durr angry made her uneasy, but that in turn made her feel guilty. He had only been honest, and he didn’t wrangle like Irina’s men. Rusalka was there helping after the plasterers were done, and Goulliand finished his martyrdom of walls, and Dulcy noticed that Durr studied Rusalka with pale moon eyes while they wiped the place down, hung the curtains, and had the furniture and coal delivered. He watched Margaret the same way.

  •••

  Dulcy had told Eugenia she’d need her room until April 1, but she’d had Irving gradually move her things from the hotel. The gray shearling and the blue valise were stowed in the smaller upstairs bedroom, and she kept the door locked. It was her Bluebeard room.

  A few days before the official end of winter, she walked back with a small satchel and some groceries and let herself in. She lit the furnace and loaded wood into the stove and left her groceries in a bin on the cold front porch. She made tea and began the christening task of painting her pantry a bright Swedish blue with a pot of paint she’d smuggled in that afternoon. Martha’s shelves had been a deep ironic grape color; Goulliand would have been horrified, but Goulliand was finished and paid, off drinking away the job. Dulcy planned to layer her paint like shellac so that it could be scrubbed without chipping for years, so she wouldn’t have to line things with tatty muslin.

  When the first layer was down, she opened the pantry window and shut the door, poured herself some wine and twirled around the house, unpacking silverware and linens, moving the bedstead around the south-facing room for the right feel from the windows, walking barefoot to not gouge the freshly varnished floors while she put her very few belongings on her very many shelves, running back and forth. She was giddy; it made her think of running a doll through a dollhouse when she was a child, all errands and no duty, all officious joy, and it reminded her of how Martha had changed everything in her house when her husband and daughter had died, how even in the middle of that hell she’d been silly with movement.

  Dulcy’s new bedroom still had no curtains, and she watched the snow fall after she turned down the lamp. When she woke up, the coal fire had died out, and the house was cold but muffled by new snow. She found another quilt, and climbed back under. She could sleep as long as she wanted to sleep.

  •••

  “It snows in the middle of summer, sometimes,” said Samuel, shaking slush from his hat. “I gather people go ahead and plant, and then just cover the little things.”

  “Cover with what?”

  “A sheet, I think. Canvas?”

  He had no idea; he couldn’t have told the difference between a radish and a beet if they bit his gums. “You’ll be flooded, anyway,” he said. “The mosquitoes will kill you. You’ll have malaria by May.”

  “No, she won’t,” said Lewis. “The creek has a good drop. She’s ten feet over the flood level.”

  They’d toured the place before lunch. “I suppose you’re the voice of authority,” said Samuel.

  “I’ll do,” said Lewis. It was a Saturday, and they were eating at Ah Loy on Main, open again after its mysterious funeral. The place was filled with ranching families in town for supplies, but Samuel, who was wearing a new checked suit and cultivating a spotty moustache, was by far the nattiest dresser.

  “I like you better clean-shaven,” said Dulcy.

  “I’d like to look older,” Samuel had answered. “Sterner.”

  He wasn’t a fop; she wasn’t sure what he was. Lewis filled their beer glasses while Rex, who dressed in silk and wool like a banker from 1850, spoke nervously about a variation on his newest business plan—he’d had a promising note from a family friend in the Interior Department about a possible concession permit for an area of the Gardner River just inside Yellowstone Park, and he intended to construct a hot springs resort.

  “What a lovely idea,” said Margaret. “You’ll bring tour people to your own hotel.”

  “The Boiling River?” snapped Samuel. “Who on earth wants to boil? You’ll have to rename the spot, or people will think ‘boils,’ instead of luxury.”

  “I will,” said Rex, flushed. “It makes as much sense as betting on thin paper and bad writing.”

  Everyone studied the menu. The waiter came, and Dulcy pointed to a dish at a nearby table: it had real dried peppers, and what looked like spinach and fish. Margaret had a noodle dish, Samuel soup, Rex fried rice, and Lewis asked for duck. While Samuel argued with Rex—all of Rex’s idealistic business ventures removed money from the newspaper—Lewis studied the sleet outside and the trio of tough young Chinese at the table by the door. He tapped a chopstick against his water glass in an annoying fashion; he looked thinner than he had a week earlier, and Samuel had muttered about a wave of attacks. Dulcy didn’t remember what they’d told her in Walton’s Italian clinic, about how and why malaria came and went. She hadn’t heard him walk in circles on her ceiling during the last few days at the hotel, but she thought that the Sacajaweas who whispered that Irina still “ministered ” to him were wrong. Not so sure that she hadn’t asked Rusalka, in the most roundabout way possible while they were unrolling carpets.

  “No,” said Rusalka. “She used to, when he very first arrived, but they are no longer fond of each other. I think Rina only thought he might be. He had a greater liking for a married lady or widow in Bozeman, but that is maybe over.”

  “How do you know?” asked Dulcy, thinking of Lewis jumping onto the train platform back in January, buoyant and aimed for pleasure.

  “That it’s done? Letters,” said Rusalka. “The lady writes very dramatic, according to Rina. But you can’t tell if that’s so true, because Rina is not a reader.”

  Now Dulcy watched Lewis flip through a newspaper. “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been away,” he said, which wasn’t the same thing as answering. He looked a little green-skinned, though pe
rhaps the ink of the paper in front of him, the St. Patrick’s issue of the Butte Independent , reflected on his face. The taverns in Livingston had served green beer the night before, and on their way to the restaurant, the gutters were still chartreuse.

  While they talked the cooks dropped piles of noodles—roar, crackle, hiss—into the huge woks behind Lewis, the three-foot metal pans fitting into the round openings of the wood-fired stove, the wall behind so cured with fat it was almost metallic. A little boy threw a log in the side hatch every other minute, and the men at the stove, all of them with the polished skin of the perpetually roasted, dashed sauces in from the old whiskey bottles that lined the stove next to heaps of mustard and cabbage, onion and peppers, and smeared glass jugs of soy. The steam made an unlikely halo behind Lewis’s head. He had a nice, austere, saintly profile, but his mouth was a little too wide for the role.

  The food arrived, and Margaret picked at her noodles with a worried forehead. Rex was angry and stabbed his rice, and Samuel scanned the Butte paper and made jokes about Irishmen. Dulcy tried not to eat too quickly, and she fanned her face. Lewis reached out and clicked chopsticks with her, as if toasting. “You’re good with those. I imagine you’ve had better Chinese than this in Seattle.”

  “I have,” she said, before her words echoed.

  But the others didn’t seem to notice. “Or New York, certainly. Or even Butte,” Lewis said a moment later. No hint of a smile, no sense that he was playing a game. “Try some duck.”

  He reached out and she opened her mouth. She gave him a bite of the mystery fish and noticed that her hand was shaking. “What will you plant, Mrs. Nash? Flowers, vegetables, an orchard? You have a large yard to fill.”

  “All of it,” said Dulcy, watching him stab another bit of fish off her plate.

  “We’ll help,” said Lewis. “I know how to shovel.”