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Copyright © 2017 by Jamie Harrison
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher,
except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
With the exception of the Picasso drawing reproduced in Chapter 20
(© 2017 by the Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society [ARS],
New York), the images reproduced in The Widow Nash are in the
public domain, collected from the Library of Congress, the New
York Public Library, the Wellcome Collection, the Tempest
Anderson Photographic Archive held at York Museums Trust,
and such sites as the excellent BibliOdyssey, the Public
Domain Review, and Wikimedia Commons.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Harrison, Jamie, 1960– author
Title: The widow Nash : a novel / Jamie Harrison
Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint, 2017
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004027 | ISBN 9781619029286 (hardcover
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary
Classification: LCC PS3558.A6712 W53 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004027
Jacket design by Michael Fusco
Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates
ISBN 978-1-61902-928-6
COUNTERPOINT
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Printed in the United States of America
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In memory of my parents, who were nothing like anyone in this novel,
and for John Fryer, a very fine storyteller
Cordelia Blake had spent the beginning of the end of her first life, an All Souls’ Day, wandering through the new east galleries at the Metropolitan, studying marble running girls and naked men with weapons, squinting at vases and sarcophagi and gold boxes that had once served as coffins. Upstairs, a millennia later, the girls and angry men were made of oil and watercolor, framed between the play of light on hanging game and wine glasses and lemon peels, sharp and beautiful; beyond every scene of human pursuit, and through the windows of the still lives, almost all the paintings had moving water and idealized ruins, smashed down by time or war or—possibly— earthquakes.
Which made Miss Blake laugh.
—Lewis Braudel, The Lady Vanishes, 1908
Chapter 1
Almost All Souls’ Day
•
People paid attention when they arrived because Carrie was beautiful and Dulcy had jilted a rich man. Dulcy hadn’t been to the city since, and once she had a glass in her hand, she found she enjoyed the spiky, expectant whispers, the open curiosity. They wore black dresses and masks, because they were in mourning for Martha, but most of the other women were pretending to be Marie Antoinette or Cinderella, and the dust from their powdered hair dropped like dandruff. Dulcy studied the men, skimming over the earnest costumes—kings and knights—for odder types like headhunters, sheiks, and Vikings, but as she often did, she found she liked the idea of people more than the reality. An insurance man at her elbow put aside his bullfighter’s cape and cap and began talking about oysters—their different shapes, their increasing rarity—and for a little while his obsession, his sliver of strangeness, was interesting. But he didn’t bear long study; he dissolved like a bad mint.
“I met your father once, at my club,” he said. “A genius, but such a character. A little all over the place. I gather you are always in the process of traveling.”
The insurance man came from a good family, with bundles of money, but his eyes were evasive, and she could see him work through his memory, try to suss out stories of the lost engagement. As he thought, he pursed his lips and moved them in and out.
All around them, Carrie’s friends were playing divination games, courtship games: people were supposed to drip candle wax in finger bowls, blow out lines of candles and count the years they’d stay unwed, throw peels over a shoulder and guess what letter they formed, and bob for apples. There was no one in this room Dulcy felt like bobbing for, and probably no one who wanted to bob for her, but she allowed herself to be herded toward a dangling, tarnished hand mirror, to look behind her reflection for the man she would marry. For Carrie, who’d left a trail of peels every Halloween since she was three, the man in the mirror was peachfaced, hovering Alfred Lorrimer, who seemed to expand with wine and her attention that night, not so much opening like a flower as swelling like a sponge.
Dulcy stood obediently in line and opened her eyes on cue: she saw her face and a black curtain, and felt a train move below them, not a sound but a shudder. “Of course it was black,” Carrie hissed in her ear, pointing to the drapery that faced the mirror. “I want you to have fun. Can’t you just do that for a bit?”
A line of handsome, placid-faced men in silly costumes, waiting to be picked, found this amusing. “All right,” said Dulcy, finishing a second glass. “How do you say yes in Halloween?”
“As if it were a language?” asked one man.
“As if it were a language,” she said. The whole strange city vibrating around her, and here she was in a puddle of normal.
“We give up,” they said.
“Oui ,” she said. “And ja.”
“Hohoho ,” said the bullfighter. And: “Let
