Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  “What? Tell me.”

  Dez admitted her father’s misguided intentions regarding the playhouse.

  “Oh, my dear. He gave it to Asa?”

  “Well, he put it in trust for our firstborn.”

  “Oh, Dez,” Abby said. “Cut your losses. Come to New York. We’ll live together like we always said we would. We’ll find a flat in Greenwich Village, we’ll be real bohemians.”

  “Listen to you.”

  “I just don’t see you with him. I don’t see it at all.”

  “I’m hardly going to leave Asa because you don’t ‘see me’ with him after meeting the man for all of ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes was enough. And I’m not being cruel or flip, just being your friend.”

  In her quietest moments, Dez sometimes let herself wonder if she could ever really leave. First of all, there would be the awful stigma, and she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to be a divorced woman. And every imagined conversation with Asa, every explanation, regardless of the words she used, would boil down to the same hurtful confession: I married you so we would have a place to live. I didn’t think through the consequences, didn’t think ahead. “Well, Asa’s my friend, too. And I can’t leave Cascade. I promised my father I would never abandon the playhouse, promised on his deathbed no less.”

  “Too many promises to other people.”

  “Maybe so, but I made them. And it’s not like I have any means of support.”

  “You could make money doing illustrations. You have that Rockwell kind of skill. Some of the best illustrators are female.”

  “Oh, come on. Unemployment is still, what, twenty percent? Thousands of men—men with families—are without jobs, and someone would pay me to draw pictures? I don’t think so.”

  Abby ground out her cigarette and leaned in close. “Listen.” Her eyes glittered like a gambler’s. “Have you read that book A Room of One’s Own?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  Abby spoke slowly as if she were offering some gift. “She says that a woman has to have money and a room of her own if she is going to write. It’s the same for painting.”

  “I have a studio. We have some money. We’re fortunate. I am fortunate.”

  “Asa has the money. He has this house. He has your playhouse unless you have a baby—my God, don’t you see? You are heading toward a choice: sacrifice all for that playhouse or do what you were born to do and meant to do. And once a baby is born, that’s it, there’s no going back.”

  Dez looked away from Abby’s straightforward gaze. She knew the reality of babies. When they were awake you had to tend to them, and when they were asleep, they never slept for long, and could never, ever be left alone. A baby went through twenty diapers a day—diapers that had to be scraped and scrubbed and bleached and rinsed and wrung out and hung to dry on wooden racks and radiators. Every day you had to sterilize a dozen glass bottles, and this on top of the regular cooking and cleaning, the weeding, the canning, the hauling out of the creaky old washing machine that always managed to bang into your hip and make you cry out with a curse.

  “People divorce,” Abby said.

  “Not around here.” Even the word sounded ugly: divorce. “Enough. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What are you going to do down there in New York?”

  “Now’s a good time to move. If not now, when? You see your life leaving you, day after day, and you think, if not now, when?”

  Abby was talking the way she used to hear Dez talk, reciting words from Dez’s own mouth. I went to Paris because I didn’t want to look back one day and wish that I had. She had taken someone else’s philosophy and so made it her own that she was unaware of having done anything other than be what she considered herself to be.

  Well, good for her. I should be flattered. And Abby was the unmarried, the unfettered one, the one who didn’t have a theater hanging around her neck. “Good for you.” Still, there was a pang that was partly envy, partly resentment, wholly wistful. “You’ll be able to join the Art Students League.”

  “Not only that, but there’s this new program starting up—the government is going to hire people to work at all kinds of jobs. Building bridges and roads, but to paint, too.”

  “To paint what?”

  “To paint paintings, murals! To ‘bring art to the people,’ they’re saying. It’s called the Works-something-beginning-with-a-P program. Works—something. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Don’t look at me that way, it’s true.”

  “Even if it is, what’s the guarantee you’ll be hired? I’d say mobs would be after those jobs.”

  “Then I’ll be front of the mob,” Abby said, cheerfully. “Works Progress Administration, that’s it. And I was born in New York, so—” She grinned. “I’ll claim residency somehow.”

  The banjo clock chimed half after one. “Damn it,” she said. “I’d better get to my train.”

  They headed back to the station through a west wind, balmy and heavy with approaching rain. At the station, they arranged for Abby’s luggage to be put on the 2:25 to New Haven, then sat on a slatted wooden bench to wait. The waiting room was quiet, filled with the click-click-click of the minute hand on the brass clock high above the ticket window. Dez said hello to a woman from Whistling Falls, to a man whose name she couldn’t remember.

  “So where can I write you, Abby? Where will you stay tonight?” The thought only just occurring. “You have enough money to last awhile, don’t you?”

  Abby didn’t have much, she could tell.

  “Here.” Dez took out what she had and pushed the bills into Abby’s hand.

  Abby pushed them right back. “You’re sweet but I’ll do what I have to. I’ll model for food, for a place to flop.”

  To flop! The woman from Whistling Falls made herself very still, listening. “You wouldn’t model. You’re just saying that to shake me up.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, you’ll need to eat. Please.” She tucked the money deep into Abby’s purse and this time there was no objection, just a wordless look of thanks.

  “There are always bananas,” Abby said, with a trace of bitterness. “You can get a bunch of green bananas for ten cents. Did you know that? A bunch of green bananas can last you for days.” Her tongue felt for a bit of tobacco on her lip as she pulled out a tube of lipstick. She circled her mouth red and pressed her lips together with a smack. “What I’m saying is, I can’t count on anyone to take care of me but me. And if I do have to model, that’s all right. I’m prepared to do whatever it takes.”

  From the Whistling Falls crossing two miles away came the faint wail of the approaching train. It arrived with a screech of wheels and metal-to-metal scraping.

  Abby stood up and straightened her hat, smoothed her hands down her coat. “There’s a revolution going on down there in the art world. The last two decades were just the beginning. I want to be there.”

  Dez wanted to be there, too. She trailed behind Abby to the platform, where the train’s gasping metal was intent on drowning out their good-byes. Boydie Shaw, the conductor on the Connecticut Rocket who had looked after William Hart on many trips to the city, promised to take care of Abby, too. Abby accepted the hand Boydie offered, climbed the steps, and turned to smile down at Dez.

  The train fumes were engulfing, reminding Dez of coming home from that trip abroad, so full of exhilaration, so ready. New York the ultimate aim. Like Jacob’s ultimate aim. He was making progress toward his goal. The months would pass. Autumn would come and he would go. He would return to New York with a bit of money in his pocket and try his hand at the art scene again.

  And within minutes Abby would be hurtling through the countryside, arriving in New York, muscling her way into some arty crowd. A revolution. Art News was reporting a turning away from Cubism, the hard times triggering a return to Realism. Thomas Hart Benton was the man of the hour, celebrated for his scenes of everyday life rendered in a sinewy, pulsating
style. He and his followers were breathing new life into a representational style that critics were starting to call American Regionalism. He was teaching in New York, at the Art Students League, a place Dez imagined with “everyone’s there but me” despair.

  “I wish I could come,” she said. “I’d do anything to be able to do what you’re doing.”

  Abby’s face lost its smile. She grabbed hold of the rail and leaned down to look Dez straight in the face, so close Dez could smell the smoke on her breath, could see the tiny vertical lines on her lips where the lipstick clung darker. “Would you? What would you do?”

  5

  The storm started dramatically, with a darkening of the kitchen and thunder that rattled the shutters. Rain spattered the windows as Dez put away the sketches that she and Abby had drawn, as she washed their plates and cups, scrubbing where Abby’s lipstick had left a stubborn mark. She had expected Abby’s visit to be cheerful, nostalgic, a little gossipy. She had even expected a bit of envy—she was, after all, married and living in a fine house with a studio of her own. Instead, Abby had turned her unimpressed eye on Asa; she had made sly remarks about Jacob.

  Dez’s mother used to quote Abraham Lincoln whenever Dez was feeling sorry for herself. “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be,” she used to say. Dez had to make up her mind to be content, to not be a wistful person, a person with regrets. One good thing about being away from art schools and other artists and movements and everyone else’s ideas was that you weren’t overly influenced anymore, you could wake up in the morning with your own ideas, listen to your own instincts.

  So she never got to move to New York with Abby. She would just have to make New York come to her. Maybe she could do a bare-bones production, a single week of a single show—something, anything—next summer. Or a couple of matinees only, so that people from around the area could attend without staying the night. She wouldn’t be that passive waiting-around-for-things-to-change person she had been lately. I’m going to make things happen, starting now.

  She opened the icebox decisively. Asa would be feeling bad and she would start by making him feel better. She would make a nice dinner, put some extra effort in. She took two chops out of the icebox, seasoned them with salt, pepper—and leftover apple peel, there was an idea—then slid the pan into the oven. In the larder were four potatoes starting to go soft, the last carrots from the root cellar, one onion, and a small head of green cabbage. She would boil the potatoes and carrots and mash them with the onion to make a filling for the cabbage rolls Asa liked. Early on, she’d noticed the recipe in his mother’s Fanny Farmer cookbook, its page stained and creased. The rolls she made had been a happy success; she would make them again.

  And they would eat in the studio for a change. Add a bit of the unexpected to the daily routine. While the pan heated on the gas ring, she dragged a small, fold-up table from the hall closet through the parlor and set it with the Devonshire linen, the good silver. She put out a jar of apple butter that Asa had received in a barter. A hurricane lantern and her Twilight, Cascade Common painting on one of the easels set a tranquil mood. For a final touch, she tuned the radio in the parlor to the Bob Chester Orchestra, then stood there clasping her hands, looking with satisfaction over the scene she had set. And as the orchestra played, as evening settled over the house, she envied Abby a little less. Being by yourself, at night, in a city, was a lonely thing. She was happy for the bright overhead circle of light shining down on her kitchen, for the smell of the pork chops sizzling in their pan.

  She was removing the cabbage rolls from the oven when Asa arrived home, peeling off his dripping slicker and stepping into the kitchen warily, with some sense of amusement, pretending to duck. “Is she gone?” He shook his hair, letting raindrops fly, then took off his spectacles and wiped them dry. “Whew. A bit unusual, I’d say.” He removed a package of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket and tapped out a cigarette. “But I suppose they were all like that at art school.”

  “Like what?”

  He lit a match, lips clamped around his cigarette. “Oddballs!” He waved the smoke away from his face, pulled out his chair, and sat down with the evening paper.

  She couldn’t help herself. “I was at art school, Asa. Am I an oddball?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But I’m not so different from Abby.” In another life she, too, would be on her way to New York.

  He gestured as if to say the subject wasn’t worth an argument. “Smells good, Dez. What are you making?”

  “I’m not so different at all.” Something perverse in her persisting.

  He laughed aloud. “You’re nothing like her. That picture she drew! Jeez. You start drawing stuff like that and everyone will start to wonder about you.”

  “What would they wonder?” She forked the chops from the pan, spooned out the cabbage rolls. The colors were too irritatingly bland. The plates wanted a third, deep color; she should have opened a can of spinach. “What would they wonder, Asa?”

  “What was wrong with you.”

  “Why?”

  “What she drew was obscene.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “What is the difference between that and, say, that big painting Dr. Proulx has hanging in his waiting room?”

  He cocked his head. “Which?”

  “You know, the one with the girl who seems like she’s been drenched in sunlight, the one with the big red poppy. You can tell she’s nude.”

  “Come on, Dez.” His eyes asked, why was she arguing? He saw that she had been made uncomfortable by the drawing, too, by the fact that it was so clearly meant to shock. “You don’t have to ask. Taste.”

  “Whose taste?”

  “Everyone’s. People’s. Jeez, Dez.” He wanted her to let him off the hook. He still had deliveries to make, plus evening hours to put in at the drugstore. Conversation at their table was usually a simple review of the events of the day. “That thing she drew—it was degenerate. In my opinion.”

  He held the afternoon newspaper high to retreat behind its pages. The front-page headline was blacker, deeper than normal. STORM CLOUDS GATHERING IN EUROPE, and she was reminded of the strained, anxious times they lived in. Be grateful for what you have. Didn’t you just decide to make the best of things?

  She forced her voice into a gentler register. “Dinner’s ready,” she said, lifting their plates and cocking her head for him to follow.

  In the studio, he stopped short at the scene she had set. “What’s all this?” His eyes going straight to her belly.

  Of course. When a normal woman found out she was expecting, she made a special dinner to announce it.

  “Asa, no. It’s not that.”

  “But—” He looked around, at the silver, the apple butter, the painting on the easel, before appealing to her with eyes that had turned cloudy. “But you’ve made everything so special.”

  “I don’t have news, Asa. Not that kind of news.”

  “Oh.” He pushed at the wire rims of his spectacles, then sat down and touched the sides of his plate, a gesture that made her feel guilty. Who did he have in the world, besides his brother, Silas, anymore? He wanted children, roots of his own, a family.

  He looked up and gave her a bucking-up sort of smile. “What, then?”

  “I just thought we’d have a change. Do something other than eat our supper in exactly the same way every night.”

  “I see.” He hid his disappointment. He praised the cabbage rolls, praised the chops. “Juicy.” She looked down at her plate to suppress the irrational shudder that the word juicy provoked in her.

  From the radio came the sound of an audience clapping. There was a pause, the murmuring of a voice introducing the next song, then “Temptation” tinkling into the room: You came, I was alone, I should have known you were temptation.

  She jumped up. This song always reminded her of Jacob. It made her feel wild and full of crazy
longing that was pointless and stupid and wrong. “Don’t you love this song?” She positioned herself behind Asa and rested her hands on his shoulders. She closed her eyes to sway to the melody. She wanted to be in love with her husband. She pulled him to his feet, making him lead her around the narrow space between the table and the wall, putting his hands to her hips so they would rest there. She looked up into his face, and saw that even as he was baffled by her, he was still crazy for her, and wasn’t that a lucky thing? Let him be enough, she thought, relaxing against him, moving with the music, until he closed his mouth down over hers and then it was there—the knowledge—too late, that all this, of course, would lead to him wanting to go upstairs, and her temperature had spiked four days ago. Unsafe, unsafe.

  He let go. He took a few steps backward and studied her for a few moments. “What is going on, Dez?”

  Nothing. I’m just a crazy person. “Nothing.”

  “That’s right, nothing.” He composed himself before speaking, obviously trying to be nice, trying to be reasonable. “Dez, we’ve been married six months and nothing is happening and you don’t seem to want anything to happen.”

  Why not tell the truth, she realized? Why not just tell him? “I’m not ready for babies, Asa, I’m just not. And I’ve been talking to Lucy Winters.” Lucy, who had delivered three children in just under three years and was beside herself. “There’s a doctor in Worcester where I can get fitted for a diaphragm.”

  He flushed at her use of the word. “Excuse me?”

  “It will help us wait until the time is right.”

  “Why would we want to wait?”

  “Why are you in such a rush for a baby?”

  The question took him by surprise. He opened his mouth then closed it again. But she could think of a dozen reasons. Because an immediate pregnancy said a lot about a man’s virility. Because he just plain wanted one. Because maybe, unconsciously, he feared she would indeed leave, like Abby had suggested. A child would tie her to him forever, they both knew that.