And so during the day, she kept walking, despite the fact that sniveling out-of-doors left a frozen shellac on her face. At night, her ghosts marched in, but with Walton, she never had the classic sense of shock each morning, the cloudy “Is he really dead?” feeling she’d had after her mother or Martha. She didn’t half forget, or expect him to walk through a room, or think she should send a letter, or wonder what he’d like for his birthday. Watching someone hit the ground at high speed erased the typical confusion. Walton was extremely dead.
Her windows faced south and east and took in the strip of shops on Second down to Lewis Street, the corner of Callender and Second, where businessmen met to gossip, and the alley behind the Masonic Temple and the theater, packed with tavern backdoors and three Chinese storefronts: a noodle shop, an apothecary, and a laundry. Only two of the Chinese men in town had wives, according to Eugenia Knox, but the resulting six children ricocheted around the alley, little golems in quilted winter clothing, delivering drugs, food, and laundry, chasing each other around carts and napping drunks, sliding on frozen puddles. Samuel Peake, who looked forlorn when he was alone, used the alley to cut between the Enterprise and the courthouse. Irving, who had clearly been dropped on his head as a child, smoked there on every break, hopping up and down in his own cloud of warm, tubercular smoke.
At night, everything took a shift to the strange. Dulcy saw it all through the net of electric lines and telegraph lines, cables plugged into every downtown building. Once she saw a wagon roll past with two caged men in back, fingers curled around the bars like zoo animals while a policeman on horseback poked at them with a stick. Irving explained that the cage was the open-air jail for a town to the north; often the police found it easier to bring the whole problem to the county seat.
No one seemed to pay attention to the cage. But the following week, when there was a fire half a block down the street, flames shooting up several stories in the windless cold, the sidewalks filled. Irving told her it was a cigar factory, and though she thought he had to be insane, this far away from Cuba, when she opened her window—for just a moment, in the bitter cold—her room filled with the rich brown of tobacco. She could see firemen trying to knock ice out of their hoses and hear the crowd ooh and aah. She wondered if the fire might spread and if she should be worried. When the water-wagon horses started to snort below her window, she thought sparks had traveled, then saw that what had upset them was a new wagon pulling up, wolf and coyote pelts topped with two dead mountain lions. They looked alive in the firelight, and the trapper in the wagon drank from a bottle while he watched the tobacco burn.
She began to recognize the same handful of women at a tavern back door, and one night a chubby girl was folded facedown in the gap by a coal bin, her skirts hiked, one man holding her down while another pummeled her from behind. Dulcy had pulled on her robe, wondering what sort of reception she’d get from Irina if she said someone needed to be saved, then saw a policeman approach. But they all talked: the first man finished, and the officer opened his pants and started in, and when he threw his head back, she recognized Gerald Fenoways’ little brother, Hubert.
The Fenoways: the brothers were everywhere. Dulcy heard their mother was dying, and she saw the woman once, eating at the Elite with her sons. Her skull pushed at her skin, and her eyes were pools of pain, huge black pupils on a yellow background. She looked like a piece of muslin, but her face and voice cracked with rage between raspy gulps of air; she glared at her sons with inky, red-rimmed eyes, and they drank and wept. Marriage, she hissed; Dulcy wasn’t sure if Gerry was supposed to repair his, or if Hubie Fenoways was supposed to find a bride. That night she heard Gerry in the hallway, drunk, pounding on doors and screaming for his aunt Eugenia to let him in to her apartment.
Siegfried Durr’s newly built studio was kitty-corner to her room, with a glass roof that was still shiny and clear on the north side of its second floor, and Dulcy watched him fumble with his lock each morning and evening. Carefully dressed people filed in and out all day long, and sometimes she’d see the explosion of a bulb through the glass roof when he worked into the night. Once she saw a couple carrying a baby’s coffin inside. A flash of light, and they left again with their box.
When I say I was committed to pleasure, I do not mean “pleasure ” as an abstract notion. I hoped to be loved as often and as well as possible, but entirely on my own terms, and only when the mood struck. I was no different than most bachelors (or married men) in that respect. I wanted amusement, and after I’d been amused, I wanted my own company. If any one tells you otherwise, they likely lie. On waking most mornings, I knew I deserved condemnation; around midnight, I couldn’t be bothered.
Miss Dalgliesh told me it should be otherwise, and made her case convincingly, and we were engaged. Within an hour, as the wine faded, I felt a new cold liquid in my veins like mercury: panic.
I left for Cuba a week later.
—Maximillian Cope, A History of a Small War
chapter 10
Every Widow is a Love Story
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The story of the newly arrived Widow Nash, as discussed in her absence by the members of the Sacajawea Club during a meeting at the new Carnegie Library, in Livingston, on February 15, 1905:
The husband’s Christian name had been Edgar. He’d been born in London to an English father and an American mother, orphaned in India and schooled in England. Mrs. Knox was quite sure his middle name had been Walter. He had been tall and blond and Anglican, had come to New York as a young man, and had volunteered for the Cuban war immediately. Abigail Tate imagined he’d served in Astor’s contingent.
“If he was English, why our war, and not Africa?” asked Mrs. Mallow, whose husband had enlisted in 1898, though he hadn’t gone overseas. “And if he was wealthy, why fight at all?”
Eugenia Knox shrugged—she’d told them all she knew. Edgar W. and Penelope Maria Dulcinea Nash, née King, had met in New York, but married in London, and lived there for most of their marriage. (The whole notion of living in London was transcendently interesting during a Montana winter.) Maria Nash had little of her own live family, had never been close to her husband’s, and was comfortable with solitude. She’d come to town virtually empty-handed, despite her good clothing and untroubled allowance. She said she did not want reminders of her past, and of course most of her good dresses would have to wait until after a period of mourning, but the Sacajaweas agreed it still made no sense.