The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  “In the secret time before your life of married luxury?” he asked. “Did you ever play games?”

  “I did.” She sipped the whiskeyed lemonade and thought of kites and tag, tennis and running like a boy at dusk. She hadn’t had enough of it, and she missed her brothers, at least as they’d once been. If she’d said that Edgar had died earlier, she could be silly now, done with mourning, done with constraints.

  “And how long ago did your husband die? How long do you have to wait to play again?”

  Was she so transparent? “That’s very insensitive of you, Lewis,” said Samuel, who had asked the same question earlier.

  “Even if it was less than a year, you saw it coming for so long,” said Margaret. “And Frank made sure I remembered he was dying every day.”

  For a moment, there was only the sound of the pick. “Well, don’t extend the martyrdom,” said Lewis. “Don’t hide your light—what’s the phrase?”

  “Under a rock,” said Samuel.

  Lewis handed him the pick. Margaret, who still hadn’t developed a head for alcohol, bubbled in: “My husband died on May 30. I win the race.”

  “What killed them?” asked Samuel, watching Durr maneuver glass. “Gardening?”

  “Frank had a bad heart,” said Margaret, with a sliver of irony. “And Mr. Nash had several issues.”

  “A variety of things, in the end,” said Dulcy. “Meningitis. Pneumonia.”

  “And your father, the doctor, couldn’t help?” asked Lewis.

  “He was ill himself, and a specialist, anyway.” She finished the glass, thinking of the mental flaw that had led her to tell Samuel or Margaret that her father had been a doctor.

  “What sort? Heart? Liver? Brain?”

  This had to stop, and a dose of truth would be key. “The male sexual organs,” she said. “With a stress on how they interact with the nervous system. He specialized in wealthy syphilitics.”

  Samuel’s face turned a hot red, and Margaret’s eyes glazed over. Lewis, on the other hand, crowed: pure glee. “This is fascinating,” he said. “A cock doctor.”

  They ate on the porch steps; Dulcy bullied Durr down from the greenhouse roof. At dusk, it was still sixty degrees, and for the first time in weeks there was no wind. The chicken had been roasted with most of her new tarragon plant, and she’d picked most of her first lettuces. She loved the way Lewis ate: a little wild-eyed and abstracted, thinking about what he put in his mouth for one intense second before he swallowed and asked another question. Had she read any Russian writers, and had she ever been to the southern latitudes? Did she like horses, or did they make her sneeze? Or both? Did she follow a religion, and had she ever slummed to Coney Island?

  Sometimes Dulcy lied pragmatically and with ease, and sometimes she loathed herself an hour later, but she was enjoying this dance. He clearly knew that some of what she said wasn’t true at all, but he let her say it. She wondered what he’d done, and who he’d done it with; she wondered how different the women seemed to him when he was touching them, or if it was all the same, at least in hindsight. She wondered if he’d slept with the woman in the story before he’d seen her blow up, and if she was now part of his body, ink for the tattoo on his cheekbone.

  Mostly, she wondered how to become someone who did things, rather than trying to imagine them. How did it all start? Not sitting at the house in Westfield, never again with Victor, and if she hadn’t managed much of her own drama while traveling with Walton, maybe she was hopeless, and she’d sink into this town like she’d sunk into the mud that spring. She’d be left to only care about bad novels and food and the people she’d never see again.

  •••

  On April 23, Easter Sunday, Mrs. Woolley gave another party, ostensibly for the benefit of Grover O. Dewberry, moving-pictures cameraman. For the occasion, Dulcy shifted from black and gray to the nicest of the marginal widow’s weeds she had purchased in Butte: a lilac hat with smoky feathers, a matching dress that at least showed her collarbone. There’d been another soft snow, and the early-budding trees in town were draped. They passed children carrying bright Easter eggs, others hurling egg-shaped snowballs. In the untrampled snow of Mrs. Woolley’s yard, protected from such children by a forbidding iron fence, Dulcy made out bursts of narcissus glowing under the ice.

  The man of the hour had worked since the war making actuality films, and now he wanted to form his own company. Mrs. Woolley and Samuel wanted to invest, though Dulcy guessed it might simply be a way to redirect Rex, who was still intent on his spa project. Dewberry was handsome like a Gibson boy: his thick hair had a soft curl, his jaw jutted, his lashes were long, and he said things that were witty. He’d taken Miss Randall’s apartment in the Elite, Miss Randall having taken Dulcy’s, and Irina was probably peeling herself off his door nightly. He was shiny and fervent and everything he said was meant to be amusing—he didn’t stop, or allow for a pause, or realize that the relentless nature of his personality was not entirely to his advantage, at least not in Dulcy’s eyes. She realized her dislike was largely competitive: people swarmed the cameraman rather than talking to Margaret, or watching the poor freezing children outside, looking for eggs in snow banks, and Mrs. Woolley’s impressive buffet cooled while her staff grew irked. Within an hour, the guests all seemed to call him Grow -vy. Even Margaret turned a dusty pink in his presence despite Grovy’s constant references to his beautiful, beautiful, quite absent wife.

  They ate, which was at least part of what Easter was supposed to be about, and the snob in Dulcy had to admit it was all wonderful—silky dauphinois, salmon en croute with a capered sauce, a lemon soufflé. Mrs. Woolley had real wine, and even the cigars smelled delicious. Dewberry talked on and on about what he intended to film as he established a new company: the growing cities of the West, the wonders of the national parks (particularly the wonder of Rex’s new empire in Yellowstone). The point, said Grover, was that there was no war on: “And it’s very hard to catch an earthquake or a hurricane in the act. I am moving on to narrative. I must do whatever’s necessary.”

  “Grover believes in drama,” said Lewis, who had arrived late. “If warfare fails, he’ll provide. His friends worried about how he’ll cope with peacetime, but he’s managed to be creative.”

  “Travel,” said Grover.

  “There’s the other stuff,” said Lewis. “Will you show snippets of Mary , Queen of Skirts ?”

  “Be my friend, Lewis,” said Grover, gesturing to Durr to help him set up the projector.

  Dulcy ebbed to the back of the claustrophobic living room, thinking about her wet, cold feet. Samuel and Durr were wound up in the mechanics of Dewberry’s presentation—the white screening curtain kept wrinkling—and Rex honked on nervously about the weather, and what it might do to the trip he’d planned for the following week to Yellowstone Park, the one Grover intended to film. Everyone planned to go, if the weather improved. Dulcy heard her name, Margaret promising that they’d both pack furs and boots and treats for the train. She didn’t protest; she would back out later.

  The snow outside made it difficult to darken the room, even with drapes as heavy as Mrs. Woolley’s, and Grover fretted about invasive beams. Dulcy stayed on a windowsill in the far corner. It was hard to see over the sea of plumed Easter hats, colors only slightly muted by the effort to darken the room, but the director gave a helpful narration: snippets from Cuba; British troops marching along an African river, chased by dust; zoo footage of elephants and giraffes; an automobile screaming past a crowd; a cannon firing. A volcano (Grover said it was Etna; Dulcy, knowing it was Vesuvius, and that he must have bought someone else’s footage, could say nothing), pyramids near Memphis, the Fuller Building going up (Dulcy squinted, trying to find a Remfrey in the crowd), bathers in the Fort Myers surf. The World’s Fair, the ocean, an acrobat, Constantinople.

  Damascus, she thought, recognizing buildings. She wasn’t
sure if she was seeing her own past, or Walton’s, or Maria Nash’s, but it wasn’t Grover’s. The projector crackled. Florence appeared, then Paris, but the gardens were Cluny, not the Tuileries, people promenading for a full, boring minute, long enough for Dulcy to think of how it had really looked and smelled, and how much better Henning might have done with the same film if the money hadn’t disappeared.

  Lastly, Grover showed footage of the Galveston disaster, children climbing on ruins, bodies floating on the Gulf, bodies being piled in carts. Dulcy had seen photographs, but movement changed everything, and even in these scratchy images the stiff flop of ballooned bodies allowed you to smell the rot, the salt, the heat. Drowned Galveston would be all fresh wood and brick now, and the bodies from the 1900 storm had become shrimp shells and marsh grass. They were picnicking by Lake Erie the day the headlines reached them in September, and Walton worked even this tragedy into his private world. He’d stared at the waves and only heard the suck of the global undertow. Everything happened in concert. It was no coincidence that the Gulf was shaped like a volcanic crater. Dulcy wouldn’t have been surprised if Walton had tried to link August’s grasshopper infestation in Kalamazoo to tidal weight, or the radioactive core of the earth, or whatever variation currently monopolized his mind. Something bad was always happening on the planet.

  Ah, but it’s a wonderful land, [ Yellowstone is,] with its snow peaks, its canyon, colored like the sunset; its burning geysers, its seething ponds, its mud volcanoes, its blow holes for steam that smells so like Long Island City... When you hear the crust crack and feel your heels suddenly growing hot and the panting and groaning of hell sound louder below and around, you almost instinctively go somewhere else—some quieter, cooler, dryer place, where you can think of a different set of thoughts. You never know where you’re going to be steamed.

  —C. M. Skinner, Yellowstone Park: A Land of Enchantment That Even Caucasian Savages Cannot Spoil

  chapter 16

  The Rose-Pink Book of Verse

  •

  April of 1905 had been so warm that Dulcy’s neighbor, the minister Brach, had announced that End Times had arrived—sin had tilted the earth on her axis (Brach said “his ”)—and that he would be holding a sort of exorcism behind his church, a tottery log cabin by the river. Samuel and the congregation showed up to find that Brach had quietly accumulated every image of a naked woman he could find in town—an old ferryman’s prized figurehead, a dress model, bits of a second-story frieze from a building on Main Street, pried off the night before, a treasured French oil robbed from the Bucket of Blood saloon—and now hammered them to bits and set them on ceremonial fire while the crowd watched.

  Gerry was drinking, and couldn’t be bothered. The injured parties said they’d file suit against him, too.

  Dulcy turned the page on Samuel’s story to see the italicized high and low temperature records on the second page of the Enterprise , and noted they went back only twenty years. At ten a.m. on April 29 it was already seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and she unpacked her shearling coat and found some linen for the Yellowstone trip. She was going because Margaret had begged her, and Samuel had begged her, and because she was lonely. Rex was desperate and needed to prove himself with this business venture. They must support him.

  She’d spent the early morning making pasties. She began efficiently but quickly frayed, mismanaging her stove and overheating the kitchen. She opened the windows, which meant she had to keep paper over the meat to ward off an unseasonable hatch of insects; she put rocks on the paper to keep it from flying off when she propped the door open, too. The lard softened so rapidly that she had to keep the dough in the icebox until the last minute, and she threw so much of the disappointing chuck to Brach’s ratty terrier that she heard it retch into the shrubbery. The potatoes were hollow-hearted, half the onions had turned to slime, and she used all her new parsley. An hour before Samuel had said he’d swing by, she was red-faced, spackled with fat, dredged in flour, and filled with rage at the whole notion that she’d thought this was a good idea. Three of the pies broke on the sheet, and she finished shattering them when she crammed them into the overworked icebox, the ice block down to a four-inch square, the drip of melt as annoying as the flies ricocheting around the house.

  She ran a cool tub and jumped in, rethought the extreme in a matter of seconds, and got out to heat some water, then looked at the clock and gave up. She cinched a thin white blouse over a charcoal lawn skirt. She piled up her hair and stabbed her scalp while trying to secure a new hat, simple bleached straw with a pretty mossy-colored ribbon. She lined the hamper with newspaper, pulled the last of the pasties out of the oven, and lugged everything to the gate.

  Samuel looked breezy and cool and annoyed her all over again. Seersucker, a new hat—he’d picked one of her little apricot pansies and stuffed it in his buttonhole, and she didn’t bother telling him he’d chosen the wiltiest flower in the yard. He did not comment on the redolence of the pasties, and he was not apologetic when he said that she was his first stop. He did not pull up the buggy top for shade when he strolled into the Elite to roust Lewis from his den and Eugenia from her carpet-walled kingdom. Eugenia, who’d feigned enthusiasm, would inevitably not come, but she’d want Samuel to put up a struggle. Dulcy seethed in the buggy for ten minutes, then walked to Vanzant’s for a soda.

  They gave her a vanilla ice, very different than the one she’d had in Africa. This one had egg and cream and no spice, but it cheered her up. She flirted with the soda jerk, and he put her in a better mood, too, as did the fact that Samuel was annoyed when she walked out to find him circling the block for a third time.

  Lewis was in the back, pale and thin-faced. He asked for a taste of the ice, then reached out and wiped a smudge of cream from her lip.

  “I gather you were out last night,” said Samuel.

  “No. I had the fever again,” said Lewis.

  “Truly?”

  “Truly,” said Lewis. He didn’t smile. When the whites of his eyes were tinged with yellow, his irises looked hazel instead of gray.

  “Does he smell of whiskey, Maria?”

  She was tired, and she imagined burying her face against Lewis’s neck. She began to understand that he might disappear for good. “No, Samuel, let it go. Where’s Eugenia?”

  “Not coming. I wasn’t in the mood to beg. She says her husband is planning to visit.”

  “Do you believe it?” asked Lewis.

  “No.” They passed two men putting up posters, jingoing up the town for the centenary of the Lewis and Clark, the rodeo and parade, the county fair, circus, traveling Shakespearean troupe. The city fathers were ready for the summer tourist trade. When Samuel pulled up at Margaret’s house, Dulcy and Lewis sat in silence. A gust sandblasted them—a hot, alien sirocco, nothing springlike—and she clutched her head.

  “How many pins does it take to anchor that thing?” asked Lewis.

  “I don’t want to remember,” said Dulcy.

  “It mostly disguises the flour in your hair.”

  She felt for remnants of dough. Margaret started out her door, then turned around for some forgotten object. Dulcy had never seen her make a clean break of it.

  “And on your neck, too,” Lewis said, wiping gently at her nape. This was the second time he’d touched her that morning, but she let it happen. She twisted to reach into the hamper for a piece of one of the already-broken pasties. “Christ,” said Lewis. “That’s a dream.”

  She gave him another sip of the ice.

  ***

  There were twenty in Rex’s group, and he ran around the depot with red panic dots on his downy cheeks. He’d reserved a full car, and seated proper citizens toward the front, riffraff in the back. Dulcy, Margaret, Lewis, and Samuel were sorted into seats two-thirds of the way down the car, behind the Macalesters and an architect named Denison. Mrs. Woolley was a distant egret-feathered
hat up front in a clutch of bankers and East Coast ranchers, while Durr, who had been hired to help Grover film the wonders of the park and the birth of Rex’s new business, had been wedged into the last seat. People muttered about the lack of a guide. The former scout who’d worked for W. A. Chadfield Touring, the company Rex had purchased in Gardiner, had just died of peritonitis, and now they all listened to Dr. Macalester describe the mistakes the doctor might have made: operating, not operating, not washing his hands, missing rot, nicking a blood vessel. “Another guide is waiting for us,” said Rex stiffly. “Please don’t fret.”

  Macalester tilted his head back and shut his eyes. He was a transplanted New Yorker, a fly fisherman; the hatch was on, and he’d wanted to be on the Clark Fork this weekend, but Vinca wanted to see people.

  They rolled into the widening valley, the river low despite the heat, mountains still white-topped with a stubble of hacked trees on the slopes. They’d been logged since Dulcy had been here in 1896, and she could have claimed a memory with Edgar Nash, but she was tired of volunteering lies, increasingly bent on keeping her problematic mouth shut. Rex was asking for business name ideas, both for the tour company and the resort he intended to build on the Boiling River: Wonderland Rides? Wonderland Nights? Soothing Springs?

  “I hate to repeat my suggestion,” said Samuel, “but ‘Boil Away Boils’ seems admirably direct.”

  “The waters are truly curative,” snapped Rex. “They have nothing to do with hemorrhoids.”

  “Do you know that for a fact?” said Macalester, whose idea of a vacation included sleep, and whose eyes were pink with exhaustion and resentment. “The problem is terrifically common.”

  “Please don’t ridicule me,” said Rex, passing around soda and beer, trying to find his mood. “Think of a mountain fastness, a Swiss sort of spa.”

  “Fastnesses are what you want in a siege,” said Lewis. “Not in an initial sales situation.”