Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  “Maybe she has a fancy man.” He smiled at her surprise. “Is she that kind of girl?”

  “She did say she would model if she had to.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  Dez wondered if she’d been naïve. Maybe a secret lover was the reason Abby had been so reticent. “She does pride herself on being a bit wild. Her only definite plan was to join the Art Students League.”

  “Is she talented?”

  “A bit too derivative perhaps, but she’s good, yes.” She headed to the shelf where she’d put Abby’s sketch, then stopped herself. Asa had nailed that right; she was a bit embarrassed by it.

  “Dr. Proulx commissioned another painting,” he said. “He seems to have taken an interest in me. I’m not sure why, I don’t have the most colorful palette in the world, and his taste seems to run to the less gritty side of life.”

  Dr. Proulx’s waiting room was filled with paintings, including Dez’s After Rain. “Oh, he’s such a big-hearted soul. I think he’d buy a scribble from the traveling man.” She realized what she was saying before it finished coming out of her mouth. “Not you, of course—”

  But Jacob laughed.

  “You look like his son.” Paul Proulx, killed by a sniper while stringing telegraph wire along the western front. She had only snippets of memory, but there had been something similarly smoldering and intense about Paul.

  “Yes, he’s told me. He talks about him a good deal. Well, he’s asked me for a Jewish painting, whatever that means.”

  She smiled as if she was in on “whatever that means.” But all this talk of Jewishness raised questions—simple, curious questions—that she didn’t feel were polite to ask. What was it to be Jewish?

  He walked over to the bookshelf and lifted down Portia’s casket. “Maybe I’ll paint him a Shylock, with all of Shakespeare’s ambiguity.” He gave the box a shake and turned it upside down. “I wonder where I’ll be,” he said, almost to himself, “the night you open this.”

  Why did she feel startled? “It would be nice if you were in the audience,” she said, even as it struck her how unlikely that really was. In New York, he would be a world away. He would make the trip to see his family maybe once or twice a year. They lived in Springfield, more than an hour from Cascade. A visit to Cascade would have to be planned, fit in. It would never happen. They would lose touch.

  “Well, I’ll certainly try,” he said, “and hopefully someday you’ll attend some gallery opening of mine. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll move to New York too, like you always thought you would.”

  “Asa would never move to New York.” The utter, depressing truth. And now was the time to say it, to tell him Asa didn’t want him to come anymore. She couldn’t get her tongue around it.

  “He may have to move somewhere.”

  “It’s still more likely they’ll take Whistling Falls, don’t you think? And Dr. Proulx and his partners have spent this entire past year building a golf course. Those men must know something. Why would they invest in it otherwise?”

  “No idea.”

  “They must be certain—”

  “Nothing in this world is ever certain, Dez.” He said it mildly; he was simply stating a fact.

  “Well, regardless, the clubhouse is already open. It’s beautiful. Have you been up to see it?”

  “No,” he said, with a clipped chill in his voice that confused her until it hit her what it meant, and then she became an idiot who babbled. “I just don’t think the kind of men who built it would have invested in something unless they knew the reservoir wasn’t coming. Some kind of privileged information.”

  The subject needed changing. She jumped up and planted herself in front of her easel. “Add something,” she said boldly. “Whatever you think. I’m curious—this canvas is just an experiment.”

  He stayed where he was, demurring, and she said, even more boldly—it was so unlike her to be this bold, especially with him—that it seemed important that if someone was trying to express a truth they couldn’t quite get, well, if someone else could help, why not? “What is the point of art, anyway? To feel things only for yourself, or to somehow share these raptures and insights?” God, she sounded ridiculous. She pushed the brush, one of her Senneliers from Paris, into his hand. Their fingers met, and she had to look away to hide her feelings.

  “Such a perfect brush,” he said. The handle was extralong burnished wood, with cupped filbert hog bristles.

  “Isn’t it?” In Paris, she’d loved Sennelier, its cramped aisles, loved opening tubes of paint and inhaling them, fingers itching to squeeze them. Paris was a memory even more remote than Boston. Not quite real anymore, that year and a half of classes, the school’s high-domed studio, sharing the tiny rue de Fleurus flat with the wry and wonderful Jane Park from Bristol.

  Jacob would be like this, and soon: gone, turned to a memory, not quite real.

  “Okay, then.” He slipped his thumb through her palette and went after the tips of grass, the brush poised between his fingers, feathering the paint to the canvas. As he worked, he caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth. His lips were sharply cut, the lower lip full and dark, and watching him paint suddenly seemed the most erotic thing Dez had ever seen. She flushed instinctively, hard and red, then thought: It’s okay to look, to admire. I’m doing nothing wrong.

  When he stepped back, she was startled: the predominant blade of grass was the only blade of grass in the world. He could make a single brushstroke take the place of five.

  “You’re so good.”

  “So are you.” He handed her the brush, the palette. “And you are much too hard on yourself.”

  She shook her head. She was thrilled for him, but he did so easily what she had failed at, so her thrill was pricked by—something. Not envy, maybe despair. She turned her face up toward the ceiling and briefly closed her eyes. Why was perfection so hard to attain? You had an idea for something, you clearly saw how it should be executed, yet your execution fell short of your vision.

  “It was your idea,” he insisted, amused by her reaction. “I only helped with a very small part. That’s why I was a decent teacher, I suppose.”

  Surely there were people—like Pablo Picasso, thirty years of master-work and still young enough to have decades ahead of him—who were geniuses from the first breath, who were one in a generation, who could do it all on their own. Yes, there was a bit of despair, to realize you were not like that, but there was some camaraderie, some relief in finding another person like yourself. There was still the possibility of the sometime achiever, or the person who managed to produce one grand work in a lifetime. Something being better than nothing.

  “Dez, stop. You have a gift for composition that people either have or don’t have. A natural ability to draw. An eye for color. I can’t believe you’re getting so upset.”

  He peered at her. “It’s something else. What is it?”

  This was the only Art Hour she wanted. They had so few left anyway. And once Jacob was back in New York, these Thursdays would seem remote, maybe even quaint to him. He had once caught the attention of Sloan and Marsh; it was only the fault of the Crash that he’d lost his job. He would make a life again in New York, no question.

  She shook her head but he held her gaze, and something passed between them. You are going to leave. And go to New York, where I was supposed to have gone.

  “You know,” he said, “you sometimes remind me of a painting by Dante Rossetti. You just did, the way you looked up and closed your eyes. The light made a kind of halo around your hair.”

  “Really?” Hadn’t the models for all the Pre-Raphaelite paintings been pretty much the same—ethereal, long-haired? Dez’s hair contained the requisite red tones but it was unruly, shoulder-length now. And her features were modern-looking: strong nose and chin, clear eyes. Far from ethereal. In fact, she often felt like the subject of an early Picasso, the plate of which sat in a book on her studio shelf: a downtrodden woman slumped over an ironing bo
ard.

  “Wait,” she said. “Elizabeth Siddal?” The famous Pre-Raphaelite model Elizabeth Siddal had been Rossetti’s wife. “Ophelia in the Millais? Dead? You think I look like that?”

  He laughed. “Yes, her, but no, not that one. The particular painting I’m thinking of is The Death of Beatrice, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. I saw it in London. Do you know it?”

  She did not. He told her: how Dante Alighieri had idealized a Florentine woman named Beatrice who died young. After her death, he immortalized her in his Vita Nuova. Six hundred years later, when Elizabeth Siddal also died young, Dante Rossetti used her as the inspiration for a painting of Beatrice.

  “It’s a stunning painting, in person,” he said. “It glows.” He shrugged. “Beatrice glows. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

  Was he flirting or simply making a statement? Something was happening and she wasn’t sure it was real. Even so, her pulse began to race. She wracked her brain but couldn’t come up with any memory of the work. “When I was growing up and overly romantic, I loved the Pre-Raphaelites,” she said. “I loved all the Ophelia paintings, especially John Williams Waterhouse’s. The Pre-Raphaelites loved Ophelia.”

  “Ophelia, the perfect subject. Content to lie still, hair streaming among lilies and frogs for generations of us painters.”

  She told him about the summer her father staged Hamlet, how obsessed by Ophelia she’d been that year. “I put on a filmy white nightgown and carried hydrangea blossoms down behind the playhouse and floated in the river, the blossoms all around my head until my father found me and yanked me out of the water. I was twelve, and I’d seen death and was trying to understand it, I suppose. It was one of the only times he got really angry with me.” She began to laugh. “And he was especially angry that I would choose to impersonate, as he put it, one who ‘lacked moral strength,’ or something or other.”

  It felt good to laugh. He laughed, too. “You know,” she said, “the only Rossetti painting I can clearly see in my mind’s eye at the moment is one of a redhead combing her hair, and she was frightening-looking, as I recall.”

  “Lady Lilith. His wife didn’t model for that. His mistress did. That’s another whole story. The reason Lizzie Siddal died young was because Rossetti was unfaithful. She overdosed on laudanum. Afterward, he was so consumed by guilt that he reworked the painting to make Lady Lilith look more evil. Or so the story goes. And of course the real Lilith was evil, anyway.”

  “Real Lilith?”

  “According to Talmudic legend, Lilith was Adam’s wife before Eve.”

  And what, she wondered, was Talmudic legend? “You’re joking. I have never, ever heard of a wife before Eve.”

  “It’s true. Supposedly she was cruel and beautiful and she had no soul.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you the painting you remind me of. You look nothing like her except—”

  “Her?”

  “Except when you smile. You have an inscrutable, Leonardo kind of look to you.”

  He laughed again.

  “It goes away when you laugh.”

  “Then I’d better laugh more often.”

  She walked him outside, barely aware of another approaching storm, of thunder rolling up from the west, of the wind on her face, of her bare feet. Old leaves blew and skittered along the grass. “I’m going to try water, thanks to you.” She would paint a portrait of the playhouse on the river while it was still real, while she could still capture, precisely, how the river light fell on the clapboards and made the water reveal its depths.

  “Good,” he said. And he put a hand on her shoulder in a casual way that might have been its own sort of question, a question that she answered by letting the hand rest there.

  “Well, then,” he said, after a moment. “Until next week.”

  When the truck rumbled away down the drive, the sounds of starlings and blackbirds returned, the slopping of river water against rocks. Dez was left with the cold fact of herself, her feet on flattened grass that was fast collecting dew. She didn’t know whether it was excitement she was feeling, or panic.

  8

  Whatever she was feeling, it was a feeling that wanted either release or it wanted constant stoking, like a fire. Left to burn out, it made for ragged nerves, for irritability and vacillating emotion, for a husband who hovered at suppertime, asking too many times whether she was feeling all right.

  “I’m fine,” she told him, and waited anxiously all through the meal for him to ask about Jacob. She was ready to make a stand, defend her decision and the friendship, but he never said a word about him, and that in itself was irritating. He’d simply assumed she would do as she was told.

  He did finally ask about Art Hour, as he was putting on his jacket to return to the store. “Did you talk to anyone at the library about doing the posters?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I think it’s a little late for posters, personally.”

  He blinked at her sharp tone, and looked up from his buttons. “I suppose that’s true,” he said, reaching for her shoulder, giving it an absentminded pat.

  Don’t pat me, she wanted to say, but then he’d think it was her time of month, which in turn might bring up more talk of a visit to Dr. Proulx. Best to say nothing and keep the peace.

  Wednesday night came quickly. At Town Meeting, people looked for space on windowsills, on stairs, they crowded five-deep in the back of the auditorium. The night was spring-humid, doors and windows thrown open to the earth-smelling air. It was a smell associated with giddy promise, and appreciation, with nothing to look forward to but summer.

  But not this night, not this particular unsettled spring. Inside the hall, the sound of chairs scraping and the echoes of voices filled the rafters, everyone eager to get on with it.

  Dez arrived late. She scanned the crowd for Asa but didn’t see him. He was probably up front; he was the kind of man who arrived early and sat in the front row. If so, he would have saved a seat for her but she wanted to stay back, observe. Clutching her sketchbook and pencil, she squeezed into a spot by the rear wall, up against a radiator, behind a gaggle of young mothers, Elsie Smith and Lucy Winters, and Ginnie Miller, who tried to catch her eye. Dez pretended not to notice. Ginnie, still swollen from that baby she delivered in March, was one of those women who always made a point of resting her hand on her belly, regardless of whether it harbored anything more than breakfast, to ask if anything was new. And there was Lil Montgomery, standing uncertainly at the door—another one trying to avoid Ginnie. It was hard for Lil, being the only unmarried girl their age, though Dez had run into her two days ago and Lil, her hair freshly marceled, had gone on about an upcoming date with a man who sold ink ribbons to the telegraph office.

  More people crowded into the room, the buzz of chatter growing louder. Heads turned this way and that. Word went around that the superintendent of schools had initiated a children’s letter-writing campaign to the state house and that Johnson Post, the pastor, had announced that all services would now be opened with a prayer for the preservation of Cascade.

  Onstage, Zeke, the chairman, hunched over a long wooden table with the two other selectmen, Hartwell Page and Peter Southwick. Clara Post, town secretary, bent over her notepad, scribbling, eyeglasses sliding down her nose, managing to seem both attentive to and oblivious to Zeke, who was talking in his animated way, stabbing at the air with a cigar, a stream of smoke trailing his gestures. Zeke had a gift for elegant gestures and elegant diction; he had once played the lovable, lying Falstaff in a production of Henry IV, the only time William Hart ever hired a nonprofessional actor. But Zeke had insisted he’d make a good Falstaff and he had, playing Falstaff comically, pathetically, brilliantly. At a few minutes past seven o’clock, he walked to the center of the stage and clapped his hands. A chain of coughs echoed around the room. Dez sketched him in a few short strokes, a caricature from a political cartoon—growling demeanor, fat cigar in his mouth, buttons about to pop off his vest. Shoes scuffled, chairs scraped
, then the audience hushed and all eyes turned toward the stage.

  Zeke spoke into the fat microphone. “Basically, my friends,” he said, his voice booming out through the window where it was carried away on the evening air, “we are between a rock and a hard place. The bottom line is that 1929 and our once-illustrious summer resident, Mr. Harcourt’s, once-influential political connections lulled us into complacency. Now Mr. Harcourt is cooling his heels in Sing-Sing and Cascade is facing abolition.”

  There were murmurs—Richard Harcourt’s help had always been nothing but rumor. “Back at the New Year when the state announced they’d chosen the Cascade River, those of us in the know hoped that, with the economy the way it is and all, that the project, being so large, was going to be pushed back a few years, at least, and then maybe even forgotten. Until they passed the legislation, nothing was official. Well, now it’s official. And except for those two storms last week, we have had another dry month,” Zeke said. “The farmer’s almanac is calling for another hot summer. There’s a great deal of fear and anxiety over the water problem in Boston, and since a reservoir will take years to fill once it’s constructed, there is a very big push to get this ball rolling.”

  A growly shout erupted from one of the rows. Dr. Proulx rose to his feet, one hand heavy on his silver-topped cane.

  “I am seventy-four years old,” he said, his reedy voice tight with anger, “and I have seen drought and never-ending rain and pestilence and every manner of storm, and let me promise the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that the law of averages always wins out. This drought will end and will be followed by the kinds of rainy summers that towns like Cascade lament.”

  He’s right, he’s right, everyone turned to his neighbor to say. Addis Proulx was always right.

  Zeke raised a hand for the hall to quiet down. “Addis, I am sure you are right, and we all have high hopes that your golf course will change some minds, but unfortunately the Commonwealth of Massachusetts isn’t listening, nor are we dealing with reason here. What we’re dealing with is fear, always a formidable enemy. Fear and uncertainty that wasn’t a factor in the twenties. Secondly, we are dealing with a bureaucratic elite that is taking advantage of that fear, dreaming up elaborate schemes to solve problems in order to provide jobs for their friends.