But the empty hours stretched ahead of her. The evenings were starting to grow long. Light lingered on the lawn, which was still a soft, early-summer green, a green with bright yellow in it. She covered the meat loaf with a dampened tea towel and slid it into the still-warm oven. She pulled her hair back into a bun and slipped her feet into her loafers. A walk would be good. A walk to the falls, which felt wonderful once she was out there on the road, the breeze rippling her blouse, the pavement solid under her feet. She should walk every day. She had loved walking in Paris—along the river and up over the Pont Neuf to wander through the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis. Sometimes you needed to look up from your work, from yourself, blink your eyes—there was a sky up there, a vast expanse of air to breathe.
In town, the fresh air had brought people outdoors. A group of boys played some kind of tin-can-and-stick game on the common; a rummage sale was going on at Stein’s. Al Stein would be having plenty of those once he got his hands on the rest of Jacob’s inventory. Or maybe he already had it and she would never see Jacob again. It was possible, though painful and bewildering. So many people came into your life, and they were such a part of the everyday that it was impossible to imagine them gone until, one day, they were. There had been years of best friends at Farmington, and then Jane Park—eighteen months they’d lived together in Paris, close as cousins—and Pierre Denis, though she was always squeamish to remember him and how she had played at passion. It was Jacob who’d ignited something new, something hard to let go of.
At the Criterion Theater, the marquee had changed. The first feature was Anna Karenina, and this seemed immediately to be some kind of sign, as did the quarter she happened to have in her pocket. There, fate seemed to be saying, remind yourself what happens to wives who lust after other men.
Dez walked into the foyer. Zeke ran a Thursday night double-header every week, two movies for the price of one, and it was popular. Dez paid, took her ticket, gave it to the usher—one of Hartwell Page’s boys—and walked into the lobby, where she was immediately swarmed, treated like one of the film stars, someone joked. Elsie and Bill Smith, and Zeke, and the Pages, and Rose’s old friend Hazel Burns, who was there with Peter Southwick’s widowed father—they all wanted to know every detail, or more precisely, to be a part of the excitement and anticipation. The issue would be out on Saturday, she confirmed, and the attention was gratifying and a little bit heady until she realized that everyone was certain the publicity would foster some kind of groundswell of support to save Cascade. Then she was eager to slink away to the back row, and grateful when the lights began to dim. But who knew? Maybe the postcards would indeed foster a groundswell of support. Maybe Mr. Washburn would himself be surprised. What was meant to happen would happen, she told herself.
Onstage, the curtains parted to the trumpet fanfare that introduced the newsreels. Images flickered in grainy black and white as that man with the voice who made everything sound so dire narrated the news: Roosevelt speaking to Congress, recommending that the United States maintain neutrality. King George and Queen Mary celebrating their silver jubilee, smiling and waving from a palace balcony. Then, an odd bit about a mysterious woman who wore a long black veil and showed up at Rudolph Valentino’s tomb in Hollywood every year on the anniversary of his death. The newsreel flashed to an image of Valentino on a beach somewhere—in close-fitting swim trunks, hands resting on his hips, hair slicked back off his face. The time he came to Cascade, he was not yet a film star but part of a traveling musical production that had used the theater for a week. Dez didn’t remember him—she’d been only eight or so—but for years after his visit, people talked about him. Even her own father got caught up, lamenting that he hadn’t nabbed him for a performance—what a perfect, narcissistic Orsino in Twelfth Night he would have made.
The bit ended with an image of the veiled woman, her arms full of roses, reaching up to place the flowers on top of his tall crypt.
Whoever she was, she was part of the mysterious passion that the man’s very existence had evoked. Dez remembered the hysteria, the news of the mobbed funeral in New York, the second funeral in Hollywood. The people who killed themselves—the woman in London who took poison, the boy in New York who first covered himself with photographs of Valentino. If people could kill themselves over the death of a person they did not even know, then who knew how Dr. Proulx might have justified his own action?
Finally, the movie began, but from the start, it was all wrong. Fredric March was a stiff, unsympathetic Vronsky. Everyone except Garbo overacted, but she was too serious, too brooding. Karenin—he was simply an unsympathetic buffoon. And Dez had no patience with these movies that had people simply looking at each other and falling in love. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind. Where was the connection, what linked them together? Common interest? Understanding of the other? In the book, Vronsky so clearly saw and was attracted to Anna’s nature. The movie should show that, show her nature revealed somehow, should make clear that it was her soul that he loved.
Only the scenes between Anna and her child came off as sincere. Levin and Kitty, the heart of the novel—they barely graced this movie. The whole mess ended on a sentimental note, with Vronsky gazing at a photograph of Anna, remembering her well.
Nonsense, Dez thought. How would Vronsky not instead have been haunted by that image of Anna crushed beneath the train? What lover could look fondly upon the portrait of a loved one who had committed such a wretched suicide?
15
The Sunday magazines always arrived in Cascade on the Saturday-afternoon train from Boston. Walking to town to buy her copy, Dez rehearsed how she would react. She would be pleased, very pleased, but she would—she would have to—be objective. She would see the Standard for what it was: a popular magazine that entertained all types—the discriminating and the not-so-discriminating. Her postcards were not oils gracing a wall in the Met. They were not frescos on a church wall in Italy. They were reproductions in a popular magazine, a magazine that would be replaced in exactly seven days.
She felt strong, in control of her emotions, but as she turned down Main Street and closed in on the Handy, her surroundings blurred and her senses heightened. It was clearly crowded inside, which could only mean that the issue had arrived. She paused to control the flutter in her stomach, then pushed on the swinging screen door and stepped over the threshold, conscious of heads turning her way, Zeke catching sight of her and shouting, the cluster of people echoing Zeke, beckoning her in, swarming around. There were congratulations, thanks, and someone—Dwight, usually so bashful—sliding a copy into her hands and saying, Here you go, Miss Famous Artist!
To have someone in Cascade refer to her so. To take the magazine into her hands, to hold it, knowing her work was inside. The pages were heavy and slick and smelled of fresh ink. Her hands trembled, checking the table of contents, skimming the pages to get to 34 and 35. There they were: colorful pictorials that pleased the eye. “The colors reproduced very well,” she heard herself saying. Her worry that they weren’t as good as she remembered was unfounded. The tiny details—the king’s crown, the floating books—were compelling and pleasing, the colors sharply rendered.
Dwight was the first to ask for her autograph, and she demurred, embarrassed. But he insisted, and then they all began teasing her until she finally said all right, and signed her name in the bottom right margin: Desdemona Hart.
Dwight lifted the magazine for all to see. “Look at that,” he said. His policeman’s badge flashed in the late-afternoon sunlight; the Handy’s resident cat mewed loudly from its perch in the window. Life seemed full of light and promise and it was permissible, Dez thought, to let go, to feel exhilaration and joy, like a kite she could release and release, all the while knowing she had her hand firmly on the string. Around the country, people were looking at her work, liking it. Here in Cascade, people were proud and hopeful. It was only for seven days, so why not revel in it?
How much they pay you?
someone asked, an indistinguishable voice that didn’t ask again when the crowd, with a brief, chilly silence, told the voice—it sounded like Tilly Allison—that the question was rude.
But it was likely the question everyone was thinking, and valid, because she was being paid a crazy amount of money for doing something she had the time of her life doing. Seventy-five easy dollars to add to her playhouse fund. The cost of an actor’s wage, the cost of printing a season’s playbills. Zeke’s counter was full of someone’s grocery order—Wonder bread, cans of vegetables, a triangle of meat wrapped in thick white paper. At least ten dollars’ worth—and to think that she would be getting seven times that.
Surely, there was more work down there for her. Abby was right—if she only got herself to New York, she would do all right. Illustration was something women had been doing successfully for years. And couldn’t Asa do all right, too? If everyone in town had to leave anyway, why did it have to be Asa’s decision where they would live?
Someone tapped her on the shoulder.
“I’m happy for you, Dez.” It was Lil, though she didn’t look happy at all, her manner begrudging. But then Bud Foster burst through the screen door, interrupting with a big hug—Jeez, Dez, how’d you manage this? And Bill Hoden and his twin sons hovered off to her side, waiting, wanting to know what she had in store for next week.
Dez was almost out the door when Lil cornered her again.
“Elsie mentioned she saw you at the Criterion the other night. I thought you were too busy to go.”
It took a moment to process this—that in the midst of Dez’s small, personal glory, Lil was caught up in hurt feelings. Dez felt herself sputtering inside, thinking of all the ways she could respond, but in the end, she voiced only the truth, that the movie was very last-minute, that she didn’t even know she was going herself until she found herself wandering in.
Lil nodded. “I see,” she said. But there was something else going on, Dez wasn’t sure what.
At the drugstore, every stool was occupied, grill sizzling, drink blenders whirring, Mrs. Raymond refilling a glass cylinder with paper straws. Out back, Asa was bent over his mortar and pestle, grinding a prescription.
He looked up when she came in and he, too, behaved oddly—hesitating when Dez showed him the magazine. But his enthusiasm as he looked over the postcards was admiring and flattering. He pointed out details he liked and repeated how good the paintings were.
Still, his pleasure, his pride, seemed dampened. He was holding something back.
“Is something wrong?”
He shook his head in a way that said he was reluctant to spoil her moment, at the same time that he breathed in deep, ready to get something off his chest. “Well, it’s this,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, perplexed. “One of the operators happened to overhear you talking to that editor in New York. Saying you knew Cascade would be chosen.”
“Lil handled that call,” Dez said.
“Doesn’t matter who.”
“She shouldn’t have been listening to my conversation.”
He made a broad, forgiving gesture with his hands. “You know it happens. And that’s beside the point, which is, is this true?”
“No one knows for sure what’s going to happen.”
“But did this man make a deal with you?”
“Of course we made a deal.”
“But is it true he said he was only interested in doing this if you were positive Cascade was going to be the town they chose?”
“When did Lil tell you this?”
“It doesn’t matter, I just want to know: Did you flat-out lie to that man?”
Had she? Not flat-out, no. “Mr. Washburn knows that nothing’s very certain in this world right now. He’s happy with the feature, and so is everyone else in this town except for my own husband and someone who used to call herself my friend.”
He looked abashed; she saw him second-guessing himself. But when he wrapped her in an apologetic hug, when he said, “Just let me finish up and we’ll go celebrate,” she was sobered by a memory, a line from one of the plays, she couldn’t remember which one exactly, and she couldn’t remember the exact phrasing, but she did remember the gist: Glory is like a circle in water which spreads and spreads and by its spreading, disappears to nothing.
16
How quickly resolve, contrition, could turn to that eager, selfish state known as titillation. The crazy heartbeat, the wild wish: if only Asa had lagged behind. Because there was the black truck, parked in front of the Handy. There was Jacob himself walking out with a copy of the Standard in his hands.
“Oh, look, it’s Jacob,” she said, her voice somehow calm as her heart kicked against her chest.
He hesitated when he saw them, she could see that. But it was too late for him to do anything but do what he did, which was walk up and shake Asa’s hand, looking him full in the eye in a way that Dez suspected meant that he was contrite. Then, to Dez, he was too overly cordial, asking how was it that in the short time he’d been away, she had managed to get herself into the pages of The American Sunday Standard? “I’ve been in New York,” he explained. “I only just saw your telegram today.”
She saw the look on Asa’s face and hurried to explain how she’d come up with the idea. She knew she was blushing, and talking too quickly. It was the first time the three of them had shared the same space, and in the light of day, on Main Street, her connection to Jacob felt nothing like a relationship between two artists. He was the peddler. She was Asa’s wife.
They were on their way to the Brilliant, she said, eager to break up the meeting. But first there was the sight of Jacob’s palm disappearing inside Asa’s handshake to endure, followed by unbidden thoughts: she had known the touch of both those hands (Asa, a little bit undone to find a bride in his childhood home, in his parents’ old bedroom; Jacob, removing the pins from her hair). And what kind of a woman did that make her? The kind that hoped Jacob wouldn’t bring up what he did bring up: that he had one more delivery to make to Al, and since Stein’s closed on Thursdays, he was hoping they could have one last meeting next Wednesday. His manner was courteous, genial, as it had always been, showing Asa—and himself?—that these weekly meetings were faultless.
She wanted that final meeting—it might be her last chance to see him, and it would be innocent, the last time had simply been an aberration caused by the shock of Dr. Proulx’s death—but she had to shrug, for Asa’s sake, and murmur, “Sure,” as if he had said he would deliver some apron or sauce pot.
At the Brilliant, there was distraction in the form of more congratulations. Everyone was clearly hoping that the exposure would start some kind of countrywide swell of support for Cascade. When Asa and Dez finally slid into one of the high leather booths, Dez gazed blindly at the menu Helen Whitby offered and tried to keep up a running conversation about the next postcards. There would be two: one depicting “now,” one depicting “then.” She had so many ideas for “then,” cards, she said, wistful looks back at the 1910s and ’20s—the regattas and parades. Maybe she could do a concert on the common, seeing as how the summer band concert series was about to start.
“You should put the old boys’ camp in somewhere,” Asa said. “All those little cabins, fun to look at.”
“Good idea,” she said, relieved enough to finally meet his eyes. He looked as if he was turning something over and over in his mind, and though he didn’t seem particularly happy, he didn’t seem angry, either. He had to understand that it hadn’t been easy to tell Jacob not to come. “And for the ‘now’ card, I want to show how the town is fighting it—draw the town meeting, I think. I could put Zeke Davenport in it. He’d get a kick out of that.” Let Lil spread stories about her after seeing that.
“Zeke would.”
“I think I’ll get the special.” Her eyes sought Helen. “If I get the package to the expressman first thing Monday morning, they can promise delivery in New York by Tuesday, and then I won’t have to bother Boydie
. And I’m even thinking they might want to expand this—after Cascade, do similar pieces on other American towns. Everyone’s got a story, when you think about it, especially in these times. Here’s Helen.”
Dez had never been more grateful for Helen Whitby, for her plump good cheer and nonstop chatter as she placed their order then whistled over every detail of the postcard spread, asking a stream of questions, even making Asa laugh with her impressions of the humorless group of Boston men—must have been water authority men—who had come in a few weeks back. When Ike, behind the counter, signaled that their plates were ready, Dez wished Helen could sit with them, keep the joviality going. The food looked so good: the kind of delicious meat loaf Stan had been looking for, sliced thick and studded with peppers and onions, with Helen’s hot ketchup sauce on the side. Buttery mashed potatoes, a hill of green peas.
Asa casually picked up his fork. “So you sent him a telegram, huh?”
Dez’s heart rate slowed to a thud.
“And he was obviously never told not to come to our house anymore.”
Her appetite vanished, the food turning leaden on her plate. She pushed it away. “I couldn’t, Asa. The day I was going to was the day he found Dr. Proulx.”
Okay, his nod said, I’ll give you that but—“That day you never shared the news with me, you sent him a telegram.”
“I called the drugstore and you were out. I told you that.”
“You never bothered to call back. Yet you made an effort, you paid money, to send him a telegram.”
“I sent the telegram later, after I gave Boydie the artwork, and I just did it to let him know—it was while I was already at the office sending one to Abby.”
“I’ve been blind,” he said, banging the table with such force that even he involuntarily did what Dez did—glanced around to see if anyone noticed.
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