The Widow Nash. Jamie Harrison
there was a point to haste.
But it was Henning Falk, calling from Seattle, and Dulcy’s champagne mood evaporated while the operator finished introductions. “Walton’s dead,” she blurted out. “His ship went down. You’re calling to say he’s drowned.”
The man at the desk flinched.
“No, no,” said Henning. “I met your father this morning at the docks. But things are missing.”
She hadn’t spoken to Henning in almost three years, and never before on the telephone, but he sounded so much like himself—perhaps the voice was a little tighter, maybe there was less of a Swedish lilt at the end of each sentence—it took her a moment to find a new way to worry. “Missing. Documents?”
“Well, yes, those too, but the money,” said Henning. “We need your help; you need to come.”
Dulcy’s face was hot from alcohol and her bolt through the city, and she wiped a last flake of pastry crust from her coat. Jabbering people floated around the lobby, and a little man who looked like death was sneezing ten feet away, each seizure driving him deeper into the soft upholstery of an armchair. This “we” meant Victor Maslingen, her father’s business partner and her former fiancé: a royal summons. “You know that’s not possible. I’m sure Walton’s simply spent it.”
“Nobody could spend that much. Your father is not well.”
“Not well in what way?” There were so many possibilities.
“He’s lost his mind,” said Henning. “What little remained. He is having problems with his memory, problems with logic. He is balmy. Barmy.”
“Put him on the train. I can meet him halfway and take him home.”
“No, Dulce. He’s weak and he’s feverish and he unbuttoned in the cab and fiddled himself. And it’s all of the money, entirely, every drop gone. Victor is very upset.”
Every drop, fiddled. She felt Henning pick his way around a second language and an audience. At least six people in the hotel lobby could hear her end of the conversation; only the operator, who kept clearing his throat, could hear Henning’s. She wondered if Henning was standing in Victor’s library, if some of the static crackle was Victor, holding his breath, actually worried enough to have Henning beg her to come to Seattle.
“I don’t want Victor near me. I don’t want to have to talk to him or see him every day.”
“He won’t touch you,” said Henning. “He doesn’t want to see you, either. Please, Dulcy.”
Everything pleasant was over, again. A door slammed a continent away, Victor leaving the room.
Autumn (September 21 to December 20)
September 27, 1290, Chihli, China, 100,000 dead.
October 18, 1356, Basel, 1,000.
October 20, 1687, Lima, 5,000. A wave followed.
October 21, 1868, Hayward, California, 30.
October 27, 1891, Nobi, Japan, 7, 273.
October 28, 1707, Hōei, Japan, 5,000.
November 1, 1755, Lisbon, 80,000.
November 11, 1855, Edo, 5,000.
November 16, 1570, Ferrara, 200.
November 18, 1727, Tabriz, Iran, 80,000.
November 24, 847, Damascus, 70,000.
November 25, 1667, Shemakha, Caucasia, 80,000.
December 16, 1811, New Madrid, Missouri. (Damage to St. Louis.)
December 16, 1857, Naples, 11,000.
December 16, 1902, Andijon, Uzbekistan, 4,700.
December?, 856, Corinth, 45,000.
—from Walton Remfrey’s red notebook
chapter 2
The Red Book of Disaster
•
Walton Joseph Remfrey, engineer, earthquake enthusiast, and sufferer of tertiary syphilis, had been born in the Cornish seaside village of Perranuthnoe in 1842. His father died when he was two, before his brother, Christopher, was even born, and when their mother, Catherine, died four years later, they were sent to the workhouse in Redruth.
At fifteen, when Walton gained an engineering apprenticeship in a copper mine on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland, he first scribbled into a plain leather notebook:
12 February 1858—
The roar was like a monster’s breath, a dragon exhalation: red, yellow, then following darkness. Timbers came down like spears, through a boy’s head, a boy’s back, a rock fall landing with a sucking sound. I ran.
The notebook was a gift from an Allihies miner’s widow, who’d plucked Walton from the novice pack and slept with him. Five boys died next to him in the mine that day, and forty-six years later, while he was sick in Seattle, he would scribble down variations of what had happened without knowing if they were memories or dreams. Dulcy wasn’t sure if it made a difference: mining deaths were repetitive, and dreams were repetitive, and what did it matter, what was true or imagined? A big dark hole in the earth, and people dropped inside and disappeared. Walton had earned his nightmares.
Still, he’d enjoyed life:
8 August 1867—
I’m leaving, I said. Show me some mercy, show me your sweetness, and I’ll make it happy with mine.
No, no, no, says Ellen.
It’s my birthday soon, I said. I might die on that ocean and never know. Let me touch you—you have fevers, you might not last, you need to know, too. And, well, isn’t this wonderful?
It is, she said. Most other things are worth forgetting.
Walton had worked just as hard for his syphilis as he had for his dreams, but even before his illness, he tried to keep topics separate. Sullying the body was all good fun, but his mind deserved a system. He worked his way up and purchased two new journals, black and dull red. He scribbled an introductory limerick about a maid in his rooming house into the black one (There once was a woman from Norway , who ’d happily kneel in doorways ). By the time he was twenty-five and had saved enough to leave the Beara mines, he had separate notebooks for his travels, his scientific theories, his favorite poetry. The first brown leather notebook became a record of his financial life, while the red had the right look for disaster. He traveled with scissors and glue, pens and ink and blotting paper, trimming and pasting down newspaper accounts of tragedy, pornographic cartoons, stock prices. When he was older, he put most of these journals aside for weeks at a time—he was a busy man, not a dilettante—but the black, the red, and the brown averaged an entry a day for most of his life.
•••
When Walton’s last ship from Africa (Cape Town to Wellington to Honolulu to Seattle) docked on the morning of October 30, 1904, Henning Falk found him perched on a trunk on the docks, clutching his satchel of notebooks. He was singing—
Columbo went to the queen of Spain and made a proposition,
But what she wanted most to do was fuck in the prone position.
The queen of Spain then said to him she’d give him ships and cargo,
He said, “I’ll kiss your royal ass if I don’t bring back Chicago.”
He knew the world was round-o. The queenly cunt he’d pound-o.
That fornicating, royal-mating son-of-a-bitch, Columbo.
Henning was no sissy, but as