Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  She could sense him behind her. He was behind her on the grass.

  “Dez.”

  She inhaled deeply—Get hold of yourself!—and turned around, hands clasped together, voice as pleasant as she could manage. Of course she was happy for him, just a bit envious. She even managed a laugh.

  He looked skeptical. “Are you sure?”

  She didn’t know whether to admit her devastation or continue in the same prim, false vein. “What about that woman you see?” She couldn’t stop herself. “Ruth Sondheim?”

  His face registered a kind of resigned surprise that she had remembered Ruth’s last name, could call it up so quickly.

  “Ruth knows what’s what.” He didn’t want to talk about Ruth Sondheim, clearly, but she had to know, had to ask.

  “Is she going to New York, too?”

  “No, Dez.”

  A lie? No, Jacob didn’t lie. Or maybe he did, how would she know? “Will you visit?”

  “Of course I’ll visit.”

  But it was unlikely. She knew that, even if he did not.

  She sat down on the bench by the riverbank, a place she hadn’t sat since the day her father died. She sat on the bench and imagined her father beside her, talking and breathing then ceasing to exist less than an hour later. Nothing in life lasted, nothing stayed the same. You were a fool if you got to a certain age and still grieved about that hard fact, or railed at it. Maybe you had to at least look on the bright side of change.

  He was standing a few feet away, looking at her uncertainly. She smiled at him with an apologetic shake of her head. “Maybe, at least, when I reopen the playhouse, you’ll come?”

  “That’s something I wouldn’t miss,” he said, and there was relief in his voice.

  They were all right then, for the moment. He joined her on the bench and they sat there in companionable silence, looking across the water. But weirdly, partly, it felt like he was already gone. He was right there beside her but her brain was already starting to adapt, starting to visualize what it would be like when he was gone, when there would be no more Thursdays.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ve never sketched you and I’d like to. A sketch I’ve done myself will capture you more, I think, than any photograph could manage.”

  “Right now?”

  “I don’t need to work any more today.” After Cascade, his Thursday route usually took him down Route 13 to Alderville. He removed a penknife from his breast pocket and began to pare his drawing pencil. “What do you think?”

  She put a hand to her bun to remove the pins. “So I should take my hair down.”

  “Actually, leave it up to start,” he said. “I want to get your face right. With your hair pulled back I can really see it. Although…”—and here he smiled wryly, a bit of their normal casual banter coming into play—“your hair is a subject in itself, and of course I mean that in the best sense, and I would like to get that down on paper, too. Just not yet.”

  And so he sketched her. He rummaged in his truck to dig out a drawing board and linen paper while she carried a stool onto the porch. He sat on the stool; she positioned herself on the swing. Then he studied her face, this way and that, while she sat perfectly still, letting herself become part model, part object.

  At first, he just scratched at the paper, wordless. A delicate breeze began to blow up from the water and wisps of hair sprang free from the bun, batting at her eyes, her jaw. But she kept her shoulders motionless, conscious of her head perched on its neck, the effort involved in holding it up. She knew what it was to draw someone who had gone half-dead from the boredom of holding still. She tried her best to be still but fluid, alive. And she wondered if Abby was doing this, or would soon be doing this—holding herself still in some artist’s studio in Greenwich Village, only in her case naked and draped in sheeting.

  Sounds became amplified. She could hear the way the trees rustled. The soft breeze was full of bird music—short whistles and long caws, shrieks and twitters. One song sounded like LEEV-ing, LEEV-ing, it really did, it wasn’t pathetic transference, or anthropomorphism, or whatever Mr. Freud would say.

  Yet Jacob had admitted, he’d voiced that she was a reason to stay. What did that mean?

  It means you’re married and that in another life, things would be different. That’s what it means.

  “Addis Proulx,” he said quietly at one point, giving each syllable emphasis, in the way that you say something you can’t understand.

  “It doesn’t feel real.”

  “We had a nice bond. Maybe it was mainly because I reminded him of his son, but whatever the reason, we had some nice talks.”

  “Maybe he had some disease he never told anyone about.”

  “Maybe.” He looked off toward the river. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. He didn’t leave a note that I could see. I think people are off-base, though, if they think he did it because of the reservoir.”

  “Maybe it was the final straw. It’s infuriating and it doesn’t seem right, does it? Eminent domain. Not in a supposedly free country.”

  “Well, it’s not really a free country, is it? It’s a constitutional republic. We like to think it’s the same thing when it’s not.”

  Dez remembered a long-ago public government teacher who had always driven home that very point. But at least there was a sort of essential freedom here, unlike the autocracies and military dictatorships that were wreaking havoc on Europe. “The thing is, there are an awful lot of people who could use the money they’ll get for their property. Maybe it could be a good thing. Force us all to move, make changes.”

  Jacob’s hand, busy shading, paused midstroke. “Could you really see your father’s playhouse destroyed?”

  Of course she couldn’t, but she might have no choice. So maybe now was the time to rid herself of sentimentality. “Oh,” she said, and she acted like she was weary saying it, “what is it but timber and nails?”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  No, she didn’t, but something unreasonable was rising inside her. Something hurt and therefore disagreeable.

  “Because if that’s true,” he said, “then where’s the soul in anything?”

  “The soul? The soul is the art, the words, the totality of Shakespearean theater, which is in no danger of dying because of this.”

  “But we’re not talking about Shakespeare’s soul.” His eyes met hers. “We’re talking about your father’s.”

  “I know.” She felt terrible. “I don’t mean it, but—but if there is an afterlife, which my father wholeheartedly believed in, then his soul is in no danger of disappearing. If he was wrong and there is nothing at all, then it will just be a matter of time before my father, before even Shakespeare is forgotten. Just who Shakespeare really was is in doubt anyway, and the thing is, it doesn’t matter! The writer’s gone. The words live. Fame doesn’t really endure beyond the grave.”

  “I have a feeling we’re talking about something else here.”

  “Well, basically, it’s this: Do I sacrifice my own existence, my own art, for this myth of eternity my father believed in?”

  “You’re dwelling on abstractions, Dez.”

  “Not really.”

  “I think you are. The bottom line is, you are painting, and doing a fair bit of it.”

  She looked over to her easel, sitting by itself on the lawn. “But I always believed I was supposed to try to reach people, not just keep myself occupied. Who sees what I do? Who cares? Miss Farrell, in art school, she used to say, ‘You are a human being living in a human world. People will want to interrupt your working time. They won’t understand when you tell them you must work while the vision is in front of you, or while the light falls a certain way. They will think you are a silly, self-indulgent girl. You have to be able to live with that.’ But it’s hard advice to live by.” Especially when you lived in a place like Cascade where art meant pictures drawn by schoolchildren, and occasional trips to museums to see canvases painted by “real artists
”—real artists being something mystical, something other.

  “It’s harder for a woman, I’ll give you that, but it’s hard for all of us now. It’s hard for almost every artist no matter what time they’re born into. That’s life, Dez.”

  He was right. Her own mother never saw forty. “But if we only have one life, then we should live it fully,” she said, rising unthinkingly to her feet.

  She had forgotten that she was posing and moved to sit. No, he gestured, it was all right.

  “That’s true enough,” he said. “And this life of a peddler, honestly, how did my father do it? This morning, this awful woman giving me the hardest time because I didn’t have the color yarn she needed, and I’m hardly gone and I hear them all behind my back, That Jew’s just not the man his father was.”

  Jew. The word sounded so blunt to the ear, so impolite. It disrupted the air between them. She didn’t know what to say, only, lamely, “Things have to get better.”

  “Isn’t the great lesson of history that nothing ever changes? And what are we talking about anyway? I don’t think the minds of people like Ethel Bentonford will ever change. And the economy? How can any economy suddenly improve without something happening?”

  “It was like a blossoming, a cup running over, wasn’t it? Back in the twenties, and everyone too giddy to realize it couldn’t last forever.”

  “And now it seems we are being punished for our excesses.”

  “Now you sound like the pastor.”

  “No, just a Jew.”

  Her laughter was short. “I don’t know much about your religion.”

  He took so long to answer that she assumed he had chosen not to hear. Then he said, firmly, in a summing-up sort of way, “I don’t put much stock in it all, but it’s my background and I can’t get away from that, I know. But we’re all born the same and the only divisions between us are ones we make ourselves.”

  He handed her the sketch. He’d drawn her face tipped down so that her hands, one over the other, assumed prominence. The cuticles were stained with pigment, the nails ragged, knuckles on the right hand scraped by the washboard. He even got the scar on her thumb right—she’d been drying a glass one evening, the first week they were married, and the glass broke with her hand inside it. It bled so badly and she’d been a beast to Asa, as if it were his fault. It was his milk glass, and she’d been so afraid that cartilage was destroyed, that her hand would lose dexterity. Dr. Proulx had pronounced it fine.

  “It’s excellent,” she said. There was so much she could say about it, decided on “It’s so true.”

  He shifted off the stool to crouch in front of her, looking at it upside down.

  He was pleased with it, she could tell.

  Their bodies had been this close before, but the wall was gone now, she felt it. His confession—only one reason to stay—had changed everything. She could smell his hair, sweaty from his hat but not unpleasant, mingling with the scent of his shaving soap—the same brand, Nason’s, as Asa’s. Asa seemed far away.

  “I was thinking, last time, after I left,” he said, “how you hold your brush a certain way. Very elegant. Like a teacup. But then when you actually hit the canvas—look out.” He smiled and pumped his fists like a boxer. “You go at it with a vengeance.”

  She studied the sketch, for something to do, not knowing what to say. What he’d said could be received as intimate, or simply as an artist’s detailed observation.

  Then he did the unimaginable. He lifted the fingers of her right hand and bent his head over them. Her heart slowed and began to thud so hard and loud she was sure he could hear it.

  He looked up into her face. “I know this breaks all the rules.”

  She would describe the scene to Abby in a letter that she would rip to bits and burn in the kitchen sink. She would say that she gave in to the exhilaration of what was going to happen. That death opened doors that were usually kept closed, and something about Jacob finding Dr. Proulx opened a door between them that day. That somehow she found herself backed up against the porch column, its hard roundness fitting into the hollow of her spine, and he touched a stray bit of hair, tucked it behind her ear. Across the river, a freight train rumbled past. A leaf fell into the water and was carried away, and the Cascade River would be flooded and Jacob would be gone and this moment would never happen again. She had to seize it or lose it.

  His fingers stroked her head, following the path of her hair, root to bun, as if he were painting each strand. He enclosed the weight of the bun in his palm, squeezing, pulling, the pins tinkling onto the porch floor, the still-damp hair tumbling free.

  He took a handful of my hair, she would write. He ran his other hand along my cheek. In the midst of these moments she tried to hold on to each sensation so she could unfold the memory and let it heat her all the days and nights he would be gone: the way he wrapped his hand around her hand, the way he bent to brush his mouth against her throat, the little explosions that skittered down her spine.

  Come with me to New York.

  Did he whisper it? Did she only imagine it? He didn’t say it again, if he said it at all, and she really didn’t know if he had. Asa and the ladies cooking in the basement of the Round Church seemed far away. The wind was humid, rich with the silt smell of the river. The spring drone of insects had begun. All was smell and texture and sound she knew she would forever associate with him, and she clung to him, greedy for the moment, even though she knew that anyone could walk into the yard and see them. Then came a soaking so thorough, so unlike anything she had ever experienced before, that she was sure she was bleeding even though that was impossible. She fumbled, one hand behind her. He misunderstood her bumbling alarm and pulled away, too, uncertainly.

  Then there was true confusion: the sound of whistling, which Dez recognized in a panic as Jimmy Clifford with the afternoon mail, coming around the corner of the house.

  Jimmy waved, his mailbag slung limp and slack over one shoulder. Dez was quite sure that if Jimmy had seen them, his expression, manner, something, would reveal it. Instead, he just looked happy to find two people to talk to, especially Jacob, and crossed the lawn with eagerness he tried to tamp down. “I hear you found him,” he said, using a somber tone, but fixed on rehashing the facts the way people did at such times: So you found him and then Dwight got hold of the Athol doctor. He’s there at Oberon’s right now. Jimmy segued right into what would become the town’s unofficial verdict: that Addis Proulx killed himself because he could not bear the thought of Cascade’s destruction.

  When Dez and Jacob looked doubtful, he became insistent. “The same thing happened in the 1870s when they made a reservoir out of the Sudbury River. An old man in Ashland hung himself. Couldn’t handle the thought of losing his house. It’s right there in black and white in a newspaper down at the library, Betty’s been showing everyone. And they’re moving full steam ahead, a crew coming in next Monday to get the old boys’ camp ready for the engineers. That’s going to be their base. Just one piece for you, Dez.”

  The envelope was postmarked Worcester. Payment for the portrait, finally, hopefully. She tucked it in her pocket, and through Jimmy’s chatter, she and Jacob looked at each other. She put a hand to her heart to calm herself, willing Jimmy to leave, but he only kept talking, then asked for a lift back into town. Dez was the end of the line, he said, and his knee was bothering him.

  Jacob lifted his shoulders in a subtle, helpless gesture. It was getting late anyway.

  When they drove away, she ran inside the house and unsnapped the front of her dress in one ripping motion. She reached down. No blood. Just one trembling finger against tissue that had never felt so swollen and soft.

  She rinsed her hands under the tap, not knowing what to think, how to feel. There were rules for this kind of behavior. Guilt was supposed to be felt. But she felt only agitation. She wanted to run down the road after him. She wanted to jump into his truck and drive away and never come back. What would happen between them now? Wha
t, realistically, could happen? Nothing, she knew, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to see him again, immediately, now, forever. The need felt like it might possibly consume her.

  We find ourselves alive here, she thought, born into a cultural set of what’s right and wrong that often differs from other cultures, other time periods. You learn to trust your feelings—the sick knowledge that something’s inherently wrong, or the sure certainty that something is right. The connection with Jacob felt only right.

  10

  She couldn’t stop it. The thought of him was there when she opened her eyes in the morning; it was there when she stooped down to retrieve the newspaper, when she poured milk for Asa, when she glanced at her reflection in the mirror, when she watched her brush lay each stroke onto the tree painting, and then, finally, when she pushed it into the drying rack.

  Days passed. The doctor from Athol officially pronounced Dr. Proulx’s death an accident. Without a note, he said, there was no way to know what the man’s intentions had been, and he had no interest in maligning a decent man’s reputation. His decision allowed for a prompt funeral, which Jacob did not attend, but then, Dez reasoned, would he have even known it was happening?

  A week went by, and then another, and she was barely aware of the details of the days, so consumed was she by feverish ruminations. He must have gone to New York, she decided. Something was keeping him from coming, or from letting her know his plans. Surely he’d be back, probably when she least expected it.

  In town, placards were posted everywhere—on the doors of Town Hall, on the bulletin board next to the Handy’s screen door, nailed to trees on each end of the common. Engineers and administrators of the state water commission would be arriving in Cascade the Monday after the holiday. Final tests would begin the first week of June.