Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  “She was a tough old bird.” Abby knelt down and looked through the drying racks. She pulled out the low-key study of their old home that Dez painted when Jacob suggested she attempt to paint the senses. What are your favorite smells? he had asked. Wood smoke in November, wind that is full of rain. A busy kitchen.

  “I like this.”

  Dez had used a narrow color range and soft-focus effects to convey the moody atmosphere of rain and twilight on the common, working at eliminating detail—trying instead to distill, to convey tone by letting the dark colors impose some compositional authority on the softer hues.

  “You want to look and look,” Abby said. “I’m not sure why.”

  “I know when my paintings are right,” Dez admitted, even though she knew she risked sounding silly, or full of herself, “when I can look at them and ache with a kind of wonderful memory I can’t quite place.”

  “I know what you mean.” Abby studied it again before sliding it back into its rack. “Oh, I like this, too!” She pulled out one of the abstracted drowning studies that Dez had turned into a narrow, claustrophobia-inducing painting. “And this!” Spanish Flu, 1918, a small, square study of sturdy Rose, head bent, tending to Dez’s mother and brother. The three figures were dark and shadowy, much like her memory of that time, the flu itself a static of eerie yellow air. A burst of vermilion, off-center, suggested a bedside spray of roses.

  “Are you doing this kind of thing all the time? Such range. Good work, my dear.”

  “I’m trying. I suppose I’d like more portrait work, to bring in money, but—maybe I’m lucky times are so hard, and I live where I do. If I had nothing but portraits to do, I might get too caught up in them.”

  “We should all be so lucky.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “I’m afraid I’d find them too safe, too much of an easy trade for myself, especially now that I’m a wife.”

  Abby smiled with approval. “Right. You’d be able to keep yourself so busy you wouldn’t have time to dig into what you want to say, and because you were so busy, you’d fool yourself into thinking you were getting an awful lot done.”

  “Exactly.” Here was the Abby she had missed.

  “So this is it,” Abby said, lifting down Portia’s casket to inspect it, to turn it over in her hands and hold it to her ear and shake it. “Doesn’t it drive you mad? I’d want to peek.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t think I can wait. But it’s doing what he meant it to do—remind me I have to reopen someday. And keep painting these portraits when I can get the work. Save what I can.”

  In the kitchen, Dez perked coffee and sliced the last of the corned ham for sandwiches. She set down their two plates, and Abby regarded her solemnly, red-lacquered fingertips poised on the coffee mug.

  “So what happened?” she asked, one hand gesturing to include everything, her dark eyes too scrutinizing. “You were the one who won the Cabot Prize. You got that write-up in the Evening Transcript! You’re doing some wonderful painting but it doesn’t look like you’re doing a whole lot of it.”

  “I work every morning. And those red fingernails don’t look like you do much painting yourself.”

  “We’re talking about you. You always talked about Cascade this, Cascade that. And it’s obvious Cascade is old news now—”

  “It’s different in summer. Or it was. And it will be again.” She wanted it so desperately: the theater lobby filled, on play nights, with New York summer people. Her paintings, framed and on display. That was her only realistic chance of ever achieving any notice again. “When the summer people come back—”

  “Oh, honey.” Abby threw her hands into her lap and made her face a squish of “let’s be frank” compassion. “I don’t think they’re coming back. Even if they don’t build that reservoir, you know what? The place to be will be somewhere new. I can see that now, now that I’m here.”

  “That’s not necessarily true.”

  “It’s the way it always happens. Look—magazines are full of stories about how people are driving. Cars. More and more. All these roads and bridges Roosevelt’s going to build all over the country? Vacationers might never come back here. And I hear that Lenox is nicer, quite honestly.”

  Cascadians liked to scoff at suggestions that Lenox could overtake Cascade in general popularity, but Lenox had a similar cultural bent and long history of moneyed vacationers. Lenox, once known as the “inland Newport,” peppered with palatial “cottages,” had clear lakes and nearby mountains, and easier travel routes from New York and Connecticut.

  Abby jumped up. “Hey, I’m sorry. Let’s cheer you up, do something fun,” she said. “Get your pencils and paper. Do you still carry a pad in your pocket? We’ll draw while we talk and see where our minds take us.”

  Freudian parlor games had been popular back when they were in school—everyone bent on tapping into his or her unconscious mind. Dez fetched pencils from her worktable, pausing by the newspaper clipping Abby had referred to. Abby was right. Even if that particular clipping was yellow and dry now, she had once been written up in the Evening Transcript. She had won prizes.

  “So we talk and eat and draw,” Abby said, her hand hovering over the paper. “Now tell me about this husband of yours. Will I get to meet him? You never said much about him when we were in school—what’s he like? Go ahead! Draw!”

  Dez scratched at the paper. No, she’d never said much at all. Because I never expected to marry him, because even though I really liked him, I always felt we were too different to ever become serious.

  She gave Abby the rundown—how, after graduating pharmacy college, while Dez was in Paris, Asa had turned his father’s dusty storefront into a modern drugstore. He’d put in a grill, a fountain, and a fancy oak-and-glass cigar case with an antique, piped-in gas lighter. But all the while she was talking she was remembering how proud he’d been to show off the store to her. She’d been truly surprised and a little unsettled to know he’d been waiting for her. She tried to make light of it, tried to discourage him. She was leaving again, she said, going to Boston, to a four-year program, and she thought she wanted to try New York after that. Promise you’ll date other girls, she’d said, and he’d said he would, and he did, she knew that. But she suspected he had been secretly grateful when their fortunes turned upside down. It gave him the chance to step in and save them. The day she said yes to him was the same late-September day the sheriff knocked on the door, removed his hat, and said he couldn’t put off the Springfield National Bank any longer. Dez asked how long did they have, and the sheriff said he could give them three weeks. He was a lumbering man with big hands, and eyes that apologized for everything his mouth was forced to say. “I’m afraid I’ll have to put this up,” he said, and pushed a red auction flag into the small patch of front lawn, where it flapped in the chill breeze blowing off the town common. It was the day of her mother’s birthday—Caroline Hart, who hadn’t lived to see forty.

  “We do well enough. People still need medicines. A Coke is an affordable treat. And he barters a lot, especially with the farmers.”

  “No family of his own left?”

  “A brother down in Hartford. Silas. He sees him about once a month, when he goes down there for supplies.”

  “Well, how about some tidbits? Is he good-looking? You know, you’ve never really said, never sent a photograph, which—”

  “He’s good-looking, if that’s what matters.” Dez realized she had drawn a face. One eye had become two, had become Jacob’s. She quickly penciled in the skin, rubbing the lead back and forth, back and forth, making it Othello-dark.

  “Of course it matters. You mean to tell me it doesn’t to you?”

  Asa was ten times better looking than Jacob, so no, it didn’t matter. “He’s good-looking in that Lucky Lindy sort of way. Though not as lanky.”

  “He looks like Lindbergh? That’s good! How is he between the sheets?”

  It was stra
nge to be around someone so free-speaking again.

  Abby’s eyes scraped Dez’s face. “No good.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “He’s a little too eager,” she confided. “I mean, clumsy. I feel like he goes at it with too much gusto.” She laughed a nervous, embarrassed laugh, but it also just felt so good to confide in someone.

  “Gusto,” Abby said flatly, then burst out laughing too, so hard Dez felt hot and ashamed.

  “I’m sorry, Dezzy. I just had this image—He wasn’t possibly your first, don’t tell me that! What about that fellow in Paris you told me about, what’s-his-name? Pierre?”

  Pierre Denis. She could barely recall him now, remembered only her own skin, mouth, hips, and what had been a heady, defiant testing and tasting of Paris. “No, Asa wasn’t, not really, no, but—” They didn’t hear the back door open, didn’t realize Asa was home until he called out hello.

  He filled the door frame, spectacles and gray pharmacist’s coat making him look older than his thirty-three years, despite his clear face and bright blond hair. He removed his hat and nodded to Abby. He was welcoming and friendly. He said, “You finally made it to Cascade” and “I hear you’re moving to New York.” And Dez remembered something she definitely never liked about Abby: her way of instantly judging people. Oh, she was pleasant enough but she was soon answering Asa’s questions with the kind of clipped courtesy she reserved for people who bored her, for men, in particular, who didn’t react to her.

  Suddenly Asa made a short, choking sound, noticing what they were doing, or rather, what Abby was doing. Dez looked across the table. Abby had drawn a violent, slashing-stroke sketch of a naked woman, legs open to reveal an obscenely abundant nest of hair.

  It was shocking and embarrassing. Yet—why was it shocking and embarrassing to look upon such a nude? Why did it feel so violent? It was honest, that was all. No gently rounded body, no play of golden light upon skin. Sly Abby. Let’s see where our unconscious minds take us, she had said, when each stroke, each line of her sketch had been deliberate and well-executed.

  “That looks like one of Egon Schiele’s,” Dez said, trying for unfazed sophistication.

  Abby smirked, taking pleasure in their discomfort. She coolly asked Asa what he thought of it.

  A blush mottled his throat, then spread up into both cheeks; he looked twelve years old. He wasn’t much of an art critic, he said, and pulled his gaze away and coughed, looking over Abby’s head at Dez, eyebrows raised as high as they could go. Then he busied himself opening the icebox. “Anyone need anything? This tray’s overflowing, Dez.”

  He babbled about the ice, getting out the green delivery card for the iceman, setting it in the window sideways for a full block. “In case you forget. Jeez, it’s all water. Do you think this milk’s okay?”

  “The milk is fine, Asa.” She got up and put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll clean this up later.”

  Abby was speculative, watching them. “So, Asa, you have a drugstore,” she said. “Now, I’ve always wondered what you druggists are really doing in those back rooms.”

  He blinked, not quite sure what she was saying. “Nothing but our compounding.”

  “Maybe I’d better take a tour and see for myself.”

  He hesitated. “I’ll be pretty stacked up when I get back. Unless Dez wants to show you around?”

  “She doesn’t really want a tour, Asa.” Wishing he would just go, or that he would rise to Abby’s bait and give her a taste of her own sass. Something.

  When he finally did go, they listened to his footsteps on the back porch, to the Buick’s engine turning over. Abby cocked her head. “He does look like Lindbergh,” she said. “I’ll give you that, but is he always so serious?”

  “You weren’t very nice to him.”

  But Abby had lost the smug look. She leaned back in her chair, pulled a cigarette from her purse, and lit a match to it. She inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke in a long stream, regarding Dez with puzzled sympathy.

  “With your father sick and all your money gone, you were a muddle, poor baby. You just jumped into the fire, didn’t you? Got yourself married when we all vowed we’d have our shows first.”

  “As if having shows is just a matter of wanting them,” Dez said quietly. “I made the right decision.”

  Abby jumped up and tapped her cigarette ash into the sink. “Look, honey, I don’t want to upset you, but I think you’re in trouble here! You took a wrong turn, understandably, because your father was dying and needed a place to live, but now you’re walking down Wrong Turn Lane as if you can’t do anything about it. You don’t have babies. No babies means you can leave.”

  It was as if some exotic, preposterous bird had flown in the window and started to speak. “I couldn’t do that to Asa, hurt him like that!”

  “You stick around, you’re going to have a pack of kids. Name a woman artist who had children.”

  There was someone, she was sure, but Abby didn’t give her a chance to remember who it might be.

  “See? You can’t. No one who does anything seriously is also a mother. Unless you want babies.”

  “The thought of having one right now scares me to death,” Dez admitted. Every month it was the same: bad dreams and nail-nibbling anxiety as she waited for the proof that she had escaped yet again. But how long could she keep risking fate?

  The temptation to confess was too much. She told Abby how Rose—“Yes, that sweet old lady Rose, of all people”—with absolutely no self-consciousness, taught her, before she left for Chicago, how to calculate dangerous days: lying quietly with a thermometer, keeping charts.

  “On unsafe days, I keep Asa away with excuses. On safe days I encourage him because a few raucous mornings in a row usually keep him content for a good long while.”

  “Good girl.”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t know that it’s forgivable.”

  “Oh, you’re too hard on yourself. What about that artist friend you wrote about? What’s he like? Tell me.”

  “If you’re looking for scandal, you’re not going to find it. Honestly, he’s just a friend. And very talented. He went from studying with Lincoln Bell—”

  “He studied with Lincoln Bell?”

  Incredibly, Jacob had. And that wasn’t the half of it, Dez said. When he got to the Art Students League, in 1929, John Sloan and Reginald Marsh were there and they encouraged him to get out and paint the streets. People liked his work, it began to sell. He did a show at the Painters and Sculptors Gallery. The New York School of Art invited him to teach. “Of course, when things got bad, they had to fire him, along with all the other junior instructors, but he says he’s thankful, in a way, because that forced him to do all the traveling he did. I honestly don’t know how I’ll stand it when he leaves.”

  “Where’s he going?”

  She told Abby about Jacob’s goal to return to New York as soon as he’d sold off his father’s inventory.

  “You’re stuck on him, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.” Abby narrowed her eyes. “I hear it in your voice.”

  Dez felt herself close up, become prim. “Thanks to him I’m ridding myself of that Boston ‘formula’ I was working in so completely after all the informality of the Paris school. I’ve really begun to loosen my palette again.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”

  But how to answer? One day back in February, Jacob had brought ingredients for egg tempera: a bag of dry pigment and an envelope of thick, crystallized salt ground into powder. The instructions were simple, he said: separate the yolk from the white, pinch the yolk over a bowl, add the pigment, mix in a small amount of water, not too much. Keep it sealed and work with small amounts, quickly. Easier said than done. They’d laughed at the mess they made until Dez caught sight of the broken shells lying in the sink. They had wasted half a doze
n eggs. Other women were making eggless cakes and crusts. Dez Spaulding had wasted three days’ worth of her husband’s breakfast with another man in her husband’s kitchen. Even though the two of them were mutually, wordlessly, careful not to threaten their easy camaraderie with flirting or innuendo, Dez had been troubled. What kind of relationship wasted eggs? Wasted anything?

  “I don’t know how to talk about him. We have a friendship—a very good friendship. He’s never tried to make it anything else.” And he never had. If anything, he was the one who backed off when their conversations got too intense, who put up the wall of caution.

  “Have you?” Abby waited. “Cat’s got your tongue? Well, what does he look like?”

  The truth came out in a blurt: “The more you know him the better-looking he seems to get.” Somehow those subdued looks and quiet mannerisms added up to something startling, the embodiment of one of Shakespeare’s truths—Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.

  “Does he see anyone? Never mind. I can see by your face that he does, and you don’t like it, do you?”

  “Stop it, Abby. You’re making too much of this. He’s a normal man, of course he sees someone.” And no, she didn’t like it but she had no right not to like it, and anyway, it didn’t seem to be serious. Ruth and I just happen to have mothers who are ardent matchmakers, he’d once said.

  “Well, I just don’t understand how you live like this. You studied in Paris. You grew up with a maid and a cook and a yardman! Really, my dear!”

  “And who has a maid or cook now? Every dollar I can spare goes into art supplies or the fund to reopen the playhouse.”

  “Sell the playhouse, or worry about it later. Focus on yourself now.”

  “I would never sell it, even if there were such a thing as a buyer nowadays. And besides—” She hesitated.