Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  The idea was exactly what Dez mentioned to Asa, a good way to expand the series once the Cascade story became a photographer’s feature. “It is indeed a great idea, Mr. Washburn, an idea I planned to suggest to you myself.”

  “I see.” He hesitated a moment. “And that is as I wondered. Well, my dear, the thing that makes Miss Hadden desirable is that she could do the work here in our offices.”

  “Why?” She knew, but she needed to hear him say it, needed to hear him offer what would be a tangible excuse.

  “Well, for one thing, our turnaround time is quick. And Harry and I discussed the fact that we would want the subjects, and what’s depicted, driven by editorial decisions. Those are the kinds of decisions that are made here, around our table.”

  “But Mr. Washburn.” She was conscious, with her replies, that Alma or Lil or anyone might be listening. She prayed no one was, because what she said next gave her the sensation of jumping off Indian Cliff Rock. What if she passed up this chance and then they had to move anyway? When the time came, she would simply have to talk Asa into moving to New York. She couldn’t worry about it now. Fate was directing her, had been directing her for weeks now. “I am moving to New York,” she said.

  His voice crackled through a glitch in the telephone line. “You are? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. Splendid!”

  “I thought I told you.”

  “You didn’t, but no matter, it’s settled. Harry himself told me he’d rather see you do the work. You have the bigger talent. The job is yours if you want it.”

  Her hand clutched the phone. Please let no one have heard that, please let it all work out.

  “Miss Hart?”

  He had asked her something; she asked him to repeat it.

  “Just when will this decision by the state be made?”

  “Word is, by July first.”

  “All right then. I figure that by the end of summer, we’ll be at a point with the Cascade story where dismantling and construction might begin?” He paused for her affirmation, and she murmured noncommittally.

  “We could go for real photographs then. When do you move? We’re thinking that for the Fourth of July holiday we’ll run a contest to solicit ideas, then we can sort through them and choose the most promising. Start the new series at the end of September and run it through Christmas. Can you be here by August?”

  August. She couldn’t possibly move to New York by August. “Most likely,” she said. What was she thinking?

  “Splendid.” The rest of the call was talk of length, of deadlines, of the technicalities of magazine publication. She hung up the earpiece with shaky hands. What had she done? She paced the kitchen, agitated, gnawing her thumbnail. What would she do? She whipped open the icebox and began to pull everything off the shelves, sponging down the walls, wiping the milk bottles, the butter dish, the Hellman’s, putting everything back in a clear, defined order: dairy, meat, vegetable. When she was done, the icebox was pristine, but it was still too early to cook and she was too wound up to clean or weed or paint. She walked over to the window and looked out at the sky, pale blue with streaks of white cloud. What if her father was watching her, somehow? Are you? Are you there?

  This had to be fate; it felt like fate. She had a chance to make a success of this project, a success of herself. Abby had said she would look after herself. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned her.

  Asa would have to be talked into it—but how, she couldn’t imagine. And what if Cascade wasn’t chosen? She glanced at the morning paper, lying on the drainboard, envisioning a headline: STATE CHOOSES WHISTLING FALLS, life in Cascade carrying on unchanged. Cars driving to Lenox when the Depression was over. Finding out she was pregnant, a baby like four sturdy chains attached to each of her limbs.

  It seemed such a betrayal, to wish for the state to choose Cascade, yet—they had, all of them, been acting like taking a town went against nature. But there were ghost towns out west, weren’t there? And ruins of civilizations all over the world.

  Now was not the time to be sentimental. As a child, she’d been ridiculously sentimental about loss, about time passing. A holiday spent in Amherst with her mother’s great-aunt would bring such grief by evening—this day is gone and will never come again. A child braiding daisies by the roadside, seen briefly as they whisked past in their Ford: I will never see that child again. Then her mother and Timon died, and sentimentality became something cheap, something too small and flimsy to encompass real grief. A daisy was just a daisy.

  She didn’t have to save Cascade; it didn’t seem she could. She just had to save the playhouse. It was possible to move a building. She just needed to find someone to do it, to pay for it, find a place for it to go.

  Now was when the eyes of the country were on Cascade. And if Cascade was doomed, then now was the time to reap exposure for the playhouse. If she could get people to care about it, she might get people behind her to help her move it somewhere. Somebody had to have that kind of money. The only person she could think of, who might remotely care, was the man who’d bought the First Folio, and she honestly couldn’t remember the details. All she knew was that he was a collector who avoided the limelight and was known to be quietly hoarding as many Folios as he could get his hands on. He was wealthy enough to have been able to afford her father’s entire collection: the two First Folios—the pristine one as well as the older, less-valuable version, and the Nicholas Hilliard miniatures, the Romney sketches, the promptbooks, all the antique, rare playbills.

  She pulled the telegram from her pocket. CONGRATULATIONS!!!

  Rose would remember his name. If he cared about Shakespeare so much, maybe he’d want to help the playhouse. If he no longer had the means or desire to move it, at the very least he might know people who did.

  It was always bittersweet to know that people you loved were alive in the world but in a place where you couldn’t be with them. When Alma Webster got Rose on the line, Rose’s voice came through strong and clear, so full of emotion that Dez could almost feel Rose’s strong, ropy hands holding her face. Conscious of the long-distance call, Rose spoke staccato-fast. She’d bought a dozen copies of the Standard, she said. The story would surely change the state’s mind, she had no doubt of that. “What do you need, dear?” she asked, because no one paid for a long-distance call for no reason.

  Dez had made seventy-five dollars. If she couldn’t spend part of it on Rose, who could she spend it on? She explained that to Rose and asked everyday questions just to hear her voice, to get her to slow down and talk as if she were in the room, sitting over a cup of tea. Rose tried, but a lifetime of being thrifty was too hard to overcome. She wasn’t comfortable on the telephone. She said she liked Chicago well enough. It was cold, yes, in winter, but in summer the breezes off the water reminded her of Cascade. It was wonderful to have her sister’s girl’s children around and she loved Chicago’s markets, the fine flour she could buy on Pearl Street, for her pastries. “Of course it doesn’t have a Shakespeare theater. And it doesn’t have you. Oh, I do miss you.”

  “I will visit you,” Dez promised. “Someday I will visit you.” She told Rose her plan, that she was hoping to find someone who might be interested in moving the playhouse. “If it comes to that.”

  “Move it! From Cascade?”

  “Better than seeing it bulldozed.”

  Rose was silent. “Well, don’t jump the gun, dear. You know it’s always been just rumor.”

  Dez was about to tell her everything, then held back. What was the point?

  “And don’t even think of moving it without telling me first.”

  “I won’t.”

  Rose did remember the name of the collector. “Henry Folger. But he’s dead.”

  “Dead!”

  “He died that summer before your father died. Right after your father agreed to sell him the collection. Oh, his estate still paid and all. He was building a library down in Washington, and the poor fellow died right after they laid the corne
rstone. Your father felt terrible about it.”

  So the collector was dead. An avenue closed. Dez stayed on the line for another minute, but in the back of her mind she was thinking that the death of the person she hoped might help seemed a sign, a bad one. Yet surely, even in the midst of the Depression, there was someone else who had the means to help.

  She hung up and looked around the quiet kitchen: the dishcloth folded by the sink, the dust motes swirling in the sunlit air, all the little details that challenged any idea that life could possibly change.

  She chewed on her middle fingernail, and peered into the hall to check the time. Almost four. Still early, early enough to call on Stanley Smith. He had been in town a week. He might have a clearer idea of which way the decision was heading. Would it be too strange for her to visit? Maybe she could get an answer out of him, go forward from whatever knowledge she could obtain.

  The Cascade Hotel was a sprawling Victorian with a wraparound porch that hunkered down on the western edge of the common. In its heyday, summer rooms had always been reserved months in advance. The bankside lawn had bustled with croquet games, and waiters carrying trays of spiced tea. Now, although Mrs. Mayhew kept the place tidy, paint was peeling around the eaves. Clapboards had come loose. Dez climbed the wide steps and pushed through the front door, the lobby air moist with the smell of boiled cabbage. It permeated the rose-covered carpet, the heavy drapes. A distant sound of clinking pots came from the kitchen, and the registration desk stood unmanned. Dez slipped behind the desk to peek at the register. A flurry of men had come in over the past week. In the middle of the list, on May 31, was Mr. S. E. Smith of Newton, Mass. Room 4.

  Room 4 was on the main floor, at the end of the long hallway in the east wing. Walking there, her footsteps muffled by the carpet, she felt self-conscious. Who was she to call on a man she hardly knew, in his hotel room no less?

  She hesitated outside Room 4, knuckles poised. She’d come this far, she thought. And it was still early in the day; maybe he wasn’t even in. She knocked.

  The door opened almost immediately. “Oh,” Stan said.

  “I happened to be in the hotel,” she explained. “I just thought I’d say hello.” She was about to invite him to talk in the lobby—maybe he was embarrassed by her presence so close to where he slept—but he said, “I was hoping I’d see you again,” and stepped backward to invite her into the sitting room with a gesture that was clumsy and eager to please. “You’ve become famous since I saw you last. Come in, come in.”

  The first-floor suites were large, originally intended for guests who traveled with servants and required space. The sitting room, entirely proper for entertaining, contained two overstuffed chairs, a divan, and a desk where Stan had been working. She noted his pencils, lined up neatly on the desk, a dozen folders. Through a far door, she spied his brown fedora sitting on an ivory bedspread.

  “How do you like it here?”

  “The view is nice,” he said, following her gaze out across the croquet lawn to the playhouse. He liked watching the river, he said, the ducks that pecked around the bank.

  “I was on my way to check on things there,” she said, nodding toward the playhouse. “And I thought I’d say a quick hello. Invite you to visit my studio someday—maybe you could bring your wife and son. Since you showed such interest.”

  He loved the idea. In fact, he said, he’d just been talking to his wife, Ethel. “I said if there’s one thing I’m going to do before this day is over it’s get myself over to Stein’s and buy a frame for that portrait.” He eyed a stack of plans and papers on his desk. “I’ve been trying to get to it but I’ve been busy.”

  “How are the tests going?”

  “Well, sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to the window seat. Then he himself took a seat at the desk, crossing one leg over the other and cupping his chin in his hand. She imagined he was thinking, at first, that it was best not to say anything, but Dez was now more of a friend, wasn’t she? That was what he seemed to decide.

  “The fellows are saying that over by Pine Point the water runs funny, that it’s indicative of a lot of ledge under Cascade.”

  As Asa hoped. Something inside her began deflating.

  “We already know there’s ledge east of Maple Street,” he said. “Not that we can’t blast it out, but if Whistling Falls is easier, why not? It would save a lot of time and money.”

  A door opened and shut somewhere down the hall. Out on the common, a dog barked. “You can’t trust what you see up there,” she heard herself say.

  Stan cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “There are funny little invisible inlets along the river that divert water. Up in that whole Pine Point area,” she said, the words barely out of her mouth than she began to regret them. She couldn’t interfere with Asa’s plans, couldn’t betray him so blatantly. She couldn’t betray him at all! “But don’t pay any attention to me. What do I know?”

  And to her relief, Stan simply shrugged. “I’m sure the engineers know what they’re doing,” he said, turning his attention toward the door, where the steamy smell of the boiled-ham-and-cabbage supper had begun to drift down the hallway.

  Dez walked home with her hands dug deep into the rickracked pockets of her dress. So Whistling Falls, a sparsely populated town, would likely be chosen, which made sense. The Cascade postcard series would have to be cut short. The Postcards from America project could still go on, but she couldn’t possibly take the job. Even though when she imagined being there, meeting Mr. Washburn, working and taking classes at the Art Students League, being around like-minded friends again, her heart raced like a train.

  She told Asa she had never considered divorce and she meant it. But was she really so against it, or did the idea just seem overwhelming? They’d not been married long, but their lives were already completely blended, tangibly and legally. How did you actually go into a house and separate the life inside into objects and possessions? How did you decide what was yours, and what did you do with it all?

  Dez didn’t own a whole lot, but like anyone else, in all actuality, she was burdened by her possessions, by her four seasons’ worth of clothes and shoes, by her books, her paintings, her studio full of supplies. By the bowls and platters that had memories of her mother and Rose all over them. Her mother’s things: the pink velvet sewing box, her piano music, the Saucony lace wedding veil that Dez wore at her own wedding, the perfume atomizer, dried sticky-yellow inside but still smelling faintly of muguet des bois. And never mind all the big items: the sideboard that once belonged to her great-grandparents and which occupied the space in the hall under the banjo clock. The baby chair that belonged to her grandmother and which Asa hoped to bring down from the attic—Asa, who had no idea that such calculating thoughts were going through his wife’s mind. Her father’s English steamer trunk, her mother’s Minton vase. All of them things you didn’t pack into a suitcase and lug on a train down to the YWCA. She would have to store those things somewhere—the only place being the playhouse, which legally belonged to Asa and which she would essentially be abandoning, too. Breaking promises and vows all over the place.

  She stopped on the bridge over the Cascade Falls. How smooth and slippery the surface of the water appeared as it curved over the dam, yet seconds later that same water was ferocious, churning, white. She positioned herself against the rail so that the wind tossed her hair, so that the falls sprayed a fine mist on her face.

  Suddenly she heard a shrieking from high above the falls. She tilted her head back and searched the sky. Two eagles, talons hooked together, cartwheeled and circled groundward, part of their courtship ritual. She’d seen it only once before; it was a rare sight. What did it mean, to see that dizzying sight now? That desire must be pursued? Or that desire was exhilarating but ultimately dangerous?

  That was the thing about signs. You could read them any way you liked.

  19

  Asa drove away on Wednesday morning as Dez watched uneasily from t
he kitchen window. She rolled the washing machine, squeaking and protesting, over to the sink and fastened the hose to the tap. Water spilled into the barrel while she sorted the laundry, lights and darks. At breakfast, it seemed impossible that Asa couldn’t read her face, her mind, couldn’t see the turmoil there. Had he forgotten about Jacob’s visit? It seemed so.

  The second load was agitating and she was upstairs brushing her teeth when she heard Jacob’s truck bouncing and squeaking down the rutted drive. Anxiety bloomed inside her chest. She spat out the toothpaste, checked her hair in the mirror, and rushed downstairs and out the screen door, arriving on the porch just as he opened the car door. He stepped out onto the running board, hopped down, and waved, a casual, nonchalant wave that calmed her. He stood with his hands on his hips as she walked toward him, his manner relaxed, as if nothing awkward had ever happened.

  She said something purposefully neutral. “I can’t believe it’s your last visit.”

  “Actually, I couldn’t fit everything for Al into the truck, after all, so I’ll have to make another trip or two.”

  “Oh,” she said. Did that mean this wasn’t the last visit? He didn’t say, and because he didn’t, she didn’t like to ask.

  “I brought you a little going-away gift,” he said, walking around to the back of the truck and opening the double doors. He lifted out a small square canvas and held it to his chest so she couldn’t see what it was. The thought that he might have painted her portrait soothed the sting of realizing that no, he must not be intending to fit in a River Road art-talk visit again.

  Inside, he set the painting on her worktable, facedown. “I’ve got something else, too,” he said. “Just a little thing. From Chinatown.” He handed her a small paper fortune.