The Widow Nash. Jamie Harrison
a disappointing earthquake (or an earthquake that disappointed Walton’s theories) for a progressive clinic staffed by intelligent men. In Zurich, Berlin, Madrid, Walton was always reassured that there had been no measurable change. Dulcy would remind him that the numbness in his hand might have been caused by a binge of rant-writing to geology journals, or that the tingling in his foot had first appeared after a slide down half an Ottoman mountain, but a doctor was always more convincing with the same explanation. But now movement gave Walton away: some atrophy of the nervous system gave him a herky-jerky walk, so that he misjudged distance and slapped his feet down, and he had a strange way of moving his jaw when he was thinking.
In Seattle, Victor, a Princeton man, sought out Ivy League talent. The doctor was elegant but spent more time talking to Victor than to Walton. After her father left the room, Dulcy, on the far side of the room—she always took the far wall with Victor—watched as the doctor laughed—ho , ho , ho—patted Victor’s arm, and brought up a promising new treatment involving cobra venom.
Victor jerked his arm away. “My father’s tried that,” Dulcy said. “I would like a realistic appraisal of his condition.”
The physician shrugged and looked for his hat. “He’s dying.”
The next doctor to visit the hotel apartment was a frayed mess from Philadelphia, a Swarthmore man who insisted on talking to the patient directly, and he very tentatively suggested that Walton was doomed. He had gray sponges of hair above each ear, and nothing on top.
“Fool,” said Walton. “Find someone who knows their business, Henning.”
The doctor’s smelly bag made her think of an English expatriate who’d tended to Walton in Greece. That doctor had just come from the amputation of a tumorous foot, a souvenir he’d forgotten by the time he’d asked Dulcy to reach into his bag for a set of calipers. Her first feeling had been surprise, even a little wonder and humor, but the ragged filaments of tendon had done her in, and before she could budge she’d vomited into the bag.
“Serves you right,” Walton had said to the doctor.
Dulcy had knelt in the mess, focusing woozily on her lunch of greens and orzo, and threw up again: shreds of lamb and dark red bits of hot pepper. “Miserable girl,” the doctor had said. Walton had slapped him.
This new doctor, who staggered whenever he turned his head and steamed with the afternoon rain, wasn’t capable of giving an insult. “Mr. Remfrey, have your hands always shaken like that?”
“Of course not.”
“If your daughter wouldn’t mind leaving the room, it would be helpful to examine other areas.”
“Fuck yourself,” said Walton. “I am intact and unsored.”
The doctor, showing a bit of spine, marched over to the open French window and latched it.
“Well, what shall we do?” asked Dulcy.
“Morphine,” said the doctor. “With a regular emetic.”
“Your mother was an inbred whore,” said Walton, ratcheting himself out of bed to reopen the window. “Heal thyself, cretin.”
Walton worried about his eye falling out, but he had no notion that his brain was losing control of his limbs. He stalked up and down the halls of Victor’s apartment like a marionette. Dulcy made his nurses take him outside, and though he moved along with some of his old pace, the foot slap continued. “But I’m dead if I don’t walk,” he said. “I need the air.”
Victor insisted on interviewing staff personally, probably with an eye for spies, and chose a dimpled redhead for a nighttime nurse. “This won’t do, will it?” asked Henning, his eyes sad.
“No,” said Dulcy.
Henning hired the next applicant, a stout Bavarian with bottlebrush hair. She carried her own metallic thermometer, and Walton, without his glasses, went into a frenzy: the giant woman would put the giant needle in his cock, kill it for good.
Not such a bad idea, dozens of women too late. He moved quickly; she rarely had a chance to warn them.
•••
Long, dark, still days, such large windows and so little light. Dulcy had Walton’s bed moved closer so he could watch gulls and pelicans, and once he claimed a falcon brought a fish to the sill. No one believed him. People hid in corners of the apartment. They were all very quiet—Victor had a problem with noises. He liked some voices, notably Dulcy’s and Henning’s, but as Walton’s grew weak and hoarse, it grated despite the English accent. Victor had told Dulcy that he’d never liked his mother’s voice, even when he was a baby, and maybe he hadn’t liked to be touched, even then. Some of his fitness mania had to do with his pleasure in not having clothes against his skin; on the other hand, he couldn’t bear people seeing that skin. He liked soft, light fabrics, which worked well with his Byronic profile. It was all very misleading.
Their truce continued, careful indifference. Victor and Henning disappeared most evenings, and Henning shrugged when she asked where they went: banquets, the opera, dinners with nervous investors for new hotels. Victor inevitably sent Henning back up the elevator for things he might have forgotten, a neuroticism she’d once found charming. She learned to wait to make the run to the kitchen or to search through the papers on Victor’s desk, where she found doubt and rage, half-written letters to creditors and debtors and unions and commands to Henning:
Tell them I’ll use them for ink if they threaten a stoppage.
Tell Monty we ’ll find him, wherever he goes.
And:
Tell the doctor to give us some hope, or I’ll break the old fool’s cranium myself and dig my money out.
Victor’s aversion to laying a hand on another human was now reassuring. She wondered how far Henning’s duties went. His only free nights came when Victor visited his new fiancée, whose existence had dripped out over the course of the week. The girl’s name was Verity; her father, predictably, owned a dozen Western newspapers. Walton, in a stage whisper: “He’s found someone perfectly unhaveable. She looks like a tall goat, a thin stoat, a human moat.”
His language had become obsessive, unaware. If he said “putting on the dog ” in the morning, someone later would be lying doggo, being dogged, suffering through dog days, and (eventually) acting dodgy, which then led to Dickens and daggers and digging. It took a night’s sleep to break into a new letter of the alphabet. She couldn’t imagine that he’d really met the fiancée; Victor wouldn’t have allowed that to happen.
Victor’s chef, a tiny, dun-colored man named Emil from Strasbourg, liked to put capers in every dish and sent a menu of dinner options to the captives each afternoon. Walton always requested the same few things and ate little of what arrived. After the first week, once Dulcy heard the chef’s tiny lurching footsteps move above her bedroom in his attic quarters, wine bottles clinking gently, she went to the kitchen and made Walton the things he truly liked, despite the enthusiasm for greens and lean meats he claimed when he spoke to doctors—potpies and veloutés and puddings, nothing fresher than parsley or an apple. She snuck a glass of wine from any bottle Emil hadn’t emptied.
On a pretty night after days of rain, when Victor had stayed home with a head cold and she could hear him droning at Walton in the library, she grabbed an open bottle and climbed out the window onto the fire escape where she’d seen Emil smoke. The steps hung only a story over the hotel’s central roof, not as scary as the full drop. She pushed the bottle out, and then a glass, climbed up on a chair and crawled out, and turned to see Henning perched a few feet away, smoking a cigarette.
“Get another glass,” he said.
•••
According to Walton, when Henning had left Sweden at seventeen, he’d been about to start his second year of university, with the intention of teaching literature like his parents. But his brother-in-law beat his pregnant sister, and when she miscarried and nearly bled to death, Henning