But no one had. Helen was bent over a faraway booth, pointing out something on a menu. People were talking, eating, paying them no mind, and there, thankfully, was Zeke Davenport walking through the door.
Zeke, one hand shaded over his eyes to search the room, waved and headed over, sliding in next to Dez. For the next ten minutes, he was a savior, full of talk about the water authority, helping himself to the plate Dez had pushed away. She watched his fork digging in, back and forth, meat loaf to mouth, as he talked about the article his friend was writing for The Boston Evening Transcript—it would be published next week. Someone even came out to take pictures of the new golf course. “When I told him about Dez’s postcards, it made all the difference. They really paved the way.” He beamed at her and slapped the table. “Though she gave you the burn, didn’t she?”
In response to their quizzical looks, he flipped open his copy of the Standard and pointed to Dez’s small signatures, painted in the bottom left-hand corner of each postcard. Desdemona Hart, 1935.
“I didn’t even notice,” Asa said, turning toward Dez. “Why did you do that?”
As if she’d done something wrong. As if she’d done nothing right. “Because I did it for the playhouse,” she said. “I did it for my father. I’m the last of the line, and I’m still a Hart even if I’m married.”
Zeke slapped the table again, unaware of the tension that sat in the booth with him. “She’s always been a firecracker in disguise.”
It took forever to wind up the dinner, to pay, and then, on the way out, to stop and talk to everyone in the booths between theirs and the door. Outside, Asa set off across the common, hands stuffed into his pants pockets, walking faster than Dez could keep up. Jim Carson, on his way home in his milk wagon, had to rein in his horse to avoid running into him.
Dez caught up with him at the playhouse. He was down by the water, crouching, picking through a pile of stones. When he became aware of Dez, he hurled one into the water.
“That reminds me of a line in one of your father’s plays,” he said bitterly, nodding toward the spreading ring the stone’s entry formed. “Something about fame being like a circle in the water, getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it’s nothing. Until it’s gone.”
Too strange that he should call that same phrase to mind! A coincidence that felt like it must mean something. Her hand closed around the magazine. “I didn’t realize you paid such attention to the plays,” she said carefully.
“I liked the king plays, liked seeing how men behave when circumstances interrupt their lives.”
“Is that how you feel? That you’re on an unplanned course?”
He rested his hands on his knees and squinted out over the water. “Maybe all men should have to fight something sometime in their lives. I’m thirty-three years old and I’ve never had to fight for a blessed thing, have I? And now look at me, fighting for my home, my wife. My famous wife. Fame’s fleeting, Dez.”
Asa trusted what his senses told him, that there was threat in the form of Jacob Solomon, threat in a wife’s success. But did he imagine she was the kind of person who would run away from her promises?
“You’re not fighting for me, Asa. And I’m hardly famous.”
“You were in tough straits. You would have married anyone.”
“That’s not true.”
“Look me in the eye, Dez. And tell me the truth.”
She looked down into his eyes. For some reason, they always connected more intimately when she looked into his left eye rather than his right. The left eye latched on to her now.
“Would you have married me if the bank hadn’t foreclosed on your house?”
She remembered a frigid autumn wind blowing the red auction flag, her father hacking away in bed, fighting the pneumonia that laid double stress on his heart. “I was frantic. I needed to find us a place to live—that was the main thought in my mind, it’s true.” His receptive nod was encouraging. If they could really talk and understand each other, then there was hope for a contented future, wherever they might live. “When you asked me to marry you I honestly wasn’t thinking about myself.”
It wasn’t the response he wanted; the left eye betrayed this, turning glassy in a way he tried to hide by poking at the stones again. Maybe when people asked for honesty, what they really wanted was for you to say what they wanted to hear and for you to swear it was true. “Asa. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have married you, anyway.”
A branch floated past them, slowly, drifting another twenty feet before he finally spoke. “Tell me about Jacob Solomon.”
Her pulse lurched, and she felt foolish and large, standing over him. Tongue-tied. The mayflies were out. “Please stand up and look at me,” she said, batting at the flies.
He got to his feet. “Admit you like him.”
“Of course I like him.”
“No, that you really like him.”
“He’s my friend, of course I like him. But not in the way you’re thinking.” What else could she say? The truth? She wasn’t even sure what the truth was—desire for Jacob ebbed and flowed, and always tussled with the desire for decency and respectability and the goodwill of others. It would be wonderful to speak freely, to admit all the conflicting emotions she felt for Jacob, but she couldn’t, not without ripping apart something that likely would not stitch back together. “You’re getting your wish, you know. You heard him. He’s moving to New York.”
He looked satisfied about that. “The mayflies are out, we better go.”
They climbed up the embankment and walked along the side of the theater. Dez gazed down at the magazine in her hand. She had been so eager to see it and now it felt like old hat, like it had been out forever instead of still smelling of fresh ink. It was only an hour ago that they had set out for their celebratory dinner; now her hunger had returned but there was nowhere to go besides the Brilliant and she didn’t want to go back there. Anywhere else would involve at least an hour’s drive on dark roads, with a spare tire ready to go and more gasoline than you would want to use for an unnecessary trip.
“I don’t know what I’d do if you asked for a divorce,” Asa said.
The word itself—divorce—was startling, so vulgar and cheap, one she couldn’t imagine applied to herself. Someone asking, “Are you married?” And having to say, “I’m divorced.”
“It might be okay in some places, but around here, I can’t imagine,” he said, gesturing down the common to the rooftops and shutters of Main Street.
Those shutters would close up against the divorcee and her cold breeze. She didn’t want to be divorced. She told him that. She meant it. The word divorce, like the word suicide, stood for intentional destruction, inherently wrong. “What I’ve honestly hoped for, Asa, is that if we do have to leave Cascade, that you would consider moving to a city.”
There. Voicing the want made it real and uncomplicated, not a very big want at all. She wanted to live and work in a city, with people who were like her, with galleries and exhibitions and competitions and small restaurants you could go out your front door and walk to. “It doesn’t have to be New York, it could be Boston. I liked Boston. Boston is small enough to feel comfortable. You liked it when you visited me.”
He started to say no, then stopped himself. At least he did that. But his face flushed with exasperation.
“I love you, you know,” he said.
“Do you?” She wasn’t sure that the word meant the same thing to everyone. “What is it you love?”
“I love that you’re you, that you’re not like anyone else—Jesus, Dez, why do you have to pick everything apart?” He took her face in both his hands and pressed his lips to hers and somehow, without ever taking his hands off her, led her to the playhouse door. He still had the key and unlocked the door, throwing it open to pull her into the vestibule, his fingers swiftly, without any hesitation at all, unbuttoning her dress. It fell to the floor, a puddle around her feet that she stepped out of, aware of the slip clinging to her body, and the pict
ure she knew she made, both of them falling to the floor together. She was probably safe, the mercury in the morning was still well over 98 degrees, and even if she wasn’t, she couldn’t stop. Not today, not now, a muddle of the desire she felt from this new, sure touch of his, from his urgency.
That time with Asa was good, better than it ever had been. Maybe, she thought, this kind of satisfaction had nothing at all to do with the other person, and everything to do with your own state of mind. They finished on their backs on the cold tile floor, looking up at the ceiling, past the tall empty case where the First Folio used to preside over play nights.
“I love you,” he said, unable to conceal relief and pride.
She said “I love you, too” and they clutched fingers, hand to hand, eyes fixed on the ceiling. She imagined a fresco, a depiction of her life that ended here, upside down in her father’s playhouse. What they had just enjoyed had been like something she might mix on her palette, an accidental color mixed from a haphazard selection of sexual challenge, lust, and a certain familiar companionship. Maybe all that added up to love.
God, it was such an ill-defined word, love. And divorce such a cheap one. A theater owner’s wife out in Pittsfield had run away with the summer production’s leading man a year or two back. She’d even left her children. Everyone had said the same thing: What kind of woman did such a thing?
“And what would a divorce do to this?” Asa said without warning, releasing her hand to spread his arms toward the strapwork ceiling. “I own it, whether I like it or not.”
Was that his way of saying he would use the playhouse as a bargaining chip, if it came to that? She didn’t know. She didn’t think he did, either.
17
On Sunday night, Dez pushed back her chair and unfolded her legs—so stiff they were—and stood up to stretch. The second set was finished. She hoped the “before” postcard, circa 1912, would evoke nostalgia for that time before the war that everyone now took comfort from and looked back on as innocent. In her portrayal, an amalgam of long-ago twilit summer nights, patrons dressed in white gathered on the riverbank, where a placard announced the evening’s show: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The playhouse glowed with amber light, a few milky stars had begun to appear in the sky, and at the other end of the common, Town Hall sat peaceful and quiet. It was a picture drawn from idealized memory, a memory of childhood nights when she had either been allowed to stay up late or else watched the goings-on, wistfully, from her bedroom window.
She had barely known Asa then. He had been part of those groups of older boys she had sometimes observed joking around and shoving one another when she was put to bed earlier than she could fall asleep, and had gazed, like a prisoner, out her window with its corner view of the common.
Sometimes she saw things she wasn’t supposed to see. When she was eleven or twelve, she’d woken one night to the sound of a scuffle, to a man and woman arguing in vicious hisses. Dez lay still, hoping they would go away, feeling alone in her bed, and afraid—it sounded like they were right under her room. When she crept to the window and peered out, she saw they were in fact in the street, stopped by the waist-high iron fence that skirted the house. The man was a foot taller than the woman and gripped both her wrists in his hands; the woman tried to kick free and wrestle away. Dez was about to wake her father to go help the woman when their faces became visible in the moonlight.
It was Madelyn Crane’s parents—Madelyn, one of Dez’s summer friends. Mrs. Crane broke free but only for a moment and then Mr. Crane did something horrifying. He grabbed one of her arms and twisted it behind her back and kissed her as she whimpered and kicked. Mrs. Crane broke away then, and ran down the street, the sound of her shoes echoing in the night, Mr. Crane right behind her.
Dez had stared into the inky black of the hallway outside her bedroom door. She didn’t know how to explain what she’d seen to make it sound serious enough, and maybe it wasn’t serious. Parents sometimes had fights, of course—although she’d never seen anything like that. She crept back into bed with a sick feeling, the twisting-kissing memory playing over and over in her mind until she finally fell asleep exhausted by the whole idea of it.
The next morning, when she woke up to bright sunshine, the incident felt remote, something in the night, something that had seemed worse than it was. Later, she was on the swing reading when she heard Rose’s voice, drifting through the open kitchen window, talking to her friend Hazel, housekeeper at the Adamses’ house next door. Dez, out of her chair and up against the wall in an instant, heard it all, how Mr. Crane had caught Mrs. Crane with one of the summer men. In Mr. Crane’s own bed, no less, and after he’d come up from New York a day early just to surprise her. He’d beaten her blind, Hazel said, and Dez shrank into herself, clutching her copy of Jane Eyre, inching out of earshot. Beaten her blind.
The whole family disappeared soon after, the house packed up and left empty until an Athol family moved in the following summer. The Cranes got a divorce, everyone said. Divorce, divorce, the word repeated around town until it sounded like a profanity.
The Cranes were the only Cascade people she had ever known to be divorced. Quite a few girls at school had had divorced parents, but those girls had come from big cities—New York and Baltimore and Boston.
Dez’s life was here, in Cascade. Seventy-five dollars or not, the big cities were far away. Asa, for better or worse, was the only family she had now.
She looked down at the new paintings. The “now” card showed the town common two weeks ago. She had exaggerated the size of both the Criterion Theater and Town Hall, so as to emphasize the two streams of people heading in opposite directions to enter both buildings. On their way to see David Copperfield, oblivious and skipping, were young children holding the hands of more somber, older girls. In the opposite direction, their parents, bent and worried, streamed toward Town Hall, which was brightly lit and crowded. She had made quite a few people recognizable: Zeke standing on the steps, cigar in hand, Asa striding toward him in his gray pharmacist’s coat. Dwight and Wendell in their police uniforms. William Hart, resurrected, his white hair blown by a breeze, walked over from the direction of the playhouse.
She hadn’t painted herself in there, but looking now, she could see Asa at the depot, waiting for her train from Boston, the day she came home for good, her dormitory life finished and packed into her trunk. She could see Bud Foster driving Asa to the church on their wedding day, then driving the short distance down Spruce Street to pick up Dez and Lil and William Hart, who was too weak to walk the scant quarter-mile. She could see Asa each morning, driving down River Road, crossing the bridge, parking the Buick outside the drugstore, then getting back inside to drive it out of the boundaries of the painting—to Athol, to Belchertown, to the farms in the outlying countryside of Cascade and Whistling Falls, delivering his prescriptions, earning dollars and eggs and goodwill. She could see him driving home each night, walking in with the money he’d earned, the corn or eggs that someone had bartered for a week’s dose of digitalis. It was like he was stepping right into her painting, offering it all up, a double armful of bounty that said, Here, Dez. For you.
18
She sent Mr. Washburn the new set by expressman first thing Monday morning, then waited two long days to hear whether the Standard would go ahead with the series. During those two days it was impossible to get any kind of painting or reading or anything cerebral done. Even physical chores failed to engross her, and in fact made her restless, made her jump at every noise that might be the Western Union boy, or Jimmy with the mail, or the telephone. Late Tuesday, when the boy knocked on the door while she was upstairs washing windows, she was down the stairs and at the door within seconds.
But the telegram was from Rose: a single word—CONGRATULATIONS —followed by three exclamation marks.
Dez felt ashamed to be disappointed. Of course it was good to know Rose was proud. She folded the telegram and tucked it into her pocket and put her hand to her forehead with
a little laugh because it was as if Rose were telling her what she ought to do next. Rhubarb. Harvest a few stalks, make a nice cooked dessert. She was outside cutting the thick red stalks when news finally came.
“New York on the line,” Alma said, clicking the call through.
Mr. Washburn’s voice boomed through the receiver. “Your postcards are a resounding success!”
It took a moment for this news to process. It was like being inside a kaleidoscope, prisms of sound and image turning her upside down and around.
The editorial office, Mr. Washburn said, was receiving feedback from all over the country. “And that’s just the morning mail, and this is just Tuesday. And they are sending their feedback via postcards, my dear.” He laughed. “Lots of postcards.”
People were, unbeknown to one another, choosing the same method of responding to the article: by sending postcards of their own towns. “And the anecdotes!” he said. “The stories!” He was full of enthusiasm and details, yet Dez detected an undercurrent of something hesitant in his voice, too. And finally it came with a clearing of his throat. “So my heartiest congratulations, my dear. Although I must say I do have a bit of unwelcome news.”
She looked down at her hands, at her fingernails plugged with dirt. She closed her eyes.
“Your friend Abby stopped by.”
It was the way he said “your friend”—as if in quotes—that put her on alert. “She found her way into Harry’s office—Harry is our publisher. She had some good ideas for making use of our end page, coat-tailing the postcard idea when the decision about Cascade has been reached. Postcards from America. She’d done up some samples and she has fair talent with a pen, though not like you—”
Dez broke in, careful to keep emotion out of her voice. “What are you trying to tell me, Mr. Washburn?”
“Well, the ironical thing is that she happened in with this idea this morning, just as we were beginning to receive all these postcards. She suggested that we solicit story ideas from people across the country. Have them send in their own town stories, then she could illustrate them in the postcard format. Towns would vie with one another for a bit of fame. We could start the new series once the Cascade serial turns to photographs.”
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