Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  In her studio, she stood by the east window and looked out, willing the truck to appear. Jacob would surely have been released by Dwight and Wendell as soon as Lowell went back inside. But all was quiet, moonlight illuminating the lilac hedge, making a white ribbon of River Road.

  She sat down at her worktable, one ear cocked toward the road, trying to sketch some ideas, in pencil, for the next set of cards, but her mind kept wandering. When the clock chimed nine, she realized it was too late, he wouldn’t come. He wouldn’t risk running into Asa. And though she knew it was hopeless, she gave it another half hour.

  At nine thirty she put her pencils in their cup and got up from the table. Miles away, Asa would be driving through the night, the Buick making its steady course north. It would be hard to tell him, and hard, these next weeks, until the formal announcement, to pretend.

  She moved around the house, turning off lights, climbing the stairs, changing into a nightgown. As she brushed her teeth, she caught sight of the bottle of sleeping tablets that Asa kept on hand as a hedge against insomnia. Impulsively, she spat out the toothpaste and swallowed one, wanting oblivion. She crawled between the sheets, where it seemed strange to share Asa’s bed, considering her intentions. That thought set up a fluttering chain of doubts and what-ifs until the sleeping pill did its work.

  Hours later, she felt the panic of the drowning person—trapped, struggling. At first she didn’t know where she was and who was hurting her. She knew the sheets, white with embroidered daisy-chain hems, but the man on top of her was a shadow smelling of a roadhouse, with hands that forced her knees apart then pinned her arms to the bed.

  “Whore,” he said, to a tumbling of memory and panic. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to blank her mind, but his hot breath was all over her face, and when she turned from it he forced his tongue into her mouth, the bristles on his face scraping her chin. When he stopped and rolled over, she couldn’t tell if he’d finished or given up. Her stomach felt wet and her ribs hurt. After a minute, she dared crack open her eyes. He was a heap in the dark, reeking of whiskey, curled onto his side, arm flung out, mouth open.

  She had never known Asa Spaulding to go to a roadhouse. She wondered which he had heard—truth or gossip—and lay awake, her heart thudding, until the tablet, still slugging through her blood and brain, sent her back to sleep.

  She woke to immediate dread, to a room full of sunshine, to an urgent bladder. The sheet lay flat and empty beside her, but her dresser drawers had been pulled open, her clothes tossed all over the floor. She limped over to the window and looked down. The driveway was empty.

  In the bathroom, she took stock of the shiny raw red patch on her chin, the six small bruises, three on each fleshy bicep. On the toilet, she had to hunch over and wince through the stinging. There was little doubt she was in a fertile time, and the thought filled her with the kind of dread she usually staved off by shutting herself away in her studio.

  Her studio.

  She scrambled up and practically fell down the stairs, rushing through the parlor to fling open the studio door.

  The room was a shambles, reeking of turpentine, but even in panic she focused, mind clicking, taking inventory of the exact damage. Books and brushes and tubes of paint thrown about—no harm done. Canvases pulled from the drying racks and flung across the room, but intact. One leg of her good easel kicked in and broken. Fixable. But the big jars of turpentine and linseed oil were tipped over, puddled on the floor—how crazed could he have been? A single match and that would burst into flame. She would have to sop it all up with towels and rags, and burn those rags outside.

  Everything seemed to have been thrown about with such hatred, her sketchbook flung so hard it had sailed through the door and onto the parlor rug. Crouching to pick it up, she felt something cold underfoot. The key to Portia’s casket. She reached for it, suddenly aware, with a prickling at the back of her scalp, that she wasn’t alone. She looked up. Asa sat on the far sofa, in shadow, watching her, wearing the rumpled tan trousers and broadcloth shirt he’d worn to Hartford.

  “Asa,” she said.

  “Do you know,” he asked softly, “about your boyfriend, about the little windfall he’s expecting?”

  When she didn’t respond, he sputtered with impatience. “Do you?”

  “I heard about it last night, like everyone else. It was thoughtful of Dr. Proulx.”

  “Very thoughtful, for a dead man. Of course, now no one’s sure if he really meant to be dead.”

  She told herself to stay calm. “You’ve been listening to gossip, Asa, to Dot King and people like her. Jacob didn’t know about that will. Dr. Proulx was upset, because of the golf course, because of Cascade—who knows why, but I saw him myself not long before he did it. He wasn’t himself, he was upset. Jacob had nothing to do with anything, including your dam.”

  “Well now.” He rubbed his chin. “That’s just what everyone is saying—how they’ve begun to notice that my wife is suddenly all over town, listening in on town gossip though she normally doesn’t care two figs for that sort of thing. And she’s sticking up for the peddler, making excuses for him. And now they say you’re running off to New York with him.”

  She got to her feet, clutching the sketchbook to her chest, inching her way to the edge of the sofa opposite his. How could he know about New York? “I have no way of defending myself if I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He sprang off the sofa. “Do you think he cares about you? Do you think he didn’t know that money from Dr. Proulx was coming? Do you know what he’s done? Do you? He’s gone and blamed you. He told Elliot Lowell that you helped him close the dam. He said he had no idea I owned the land.”

  “He was telling the truth.”

  “And he said you have a job in New York, a job you haven’t even had the morality to tell me about.”

  Jacob would never have volunteered that information, she was sure of it. So how did Asa know? “I’ve been offered a job,” she said. “That’s all. It’s just an offer.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me about it?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you told him first and then you closed my dam. Why?”

  She had no idea what Jacob might have said, what Asa knew, no idea what to say.

  “I want to know,” he shouted with such fury that she fell back against the cushions. He yanked the sketchbook out of her hands and threw it down to force her palms open, “See these scrapes? He has them, too. Something else people noticed. People notice everything, don’t you know that? And they talk about what they notice.”

  He dropped her hands as if she were too disgusting to touch and inhaled deeply in a show of pulling himself together. “Stan Smith’s hands had no scrapes,” he said. He picked up the sketchbook and calmly flipped through it, then, so quickly she couldn’t believe it, he ripped out a random sketch—one of the Pine Point ones, one she’d planned to use for reference—and balled it up. And then there was wrestling and yelling on both their parts and the sketchbook fell to the floor.

  She felt his shock in the way his arms went limp; she followed his gaze. The pages had fallen open to one of the drowning scenes, the first one, more document than interpretation, showing Stan’s position facedown in the channel, the brim of his hat submerged, his twisted foot.

  Asa turned to stare at her with disbelief and horror. “You saw that man drowned? You knew?” He fumbled behind him, feeling for the sofa, and fell down heavily. “Jesus,” he said. “This is worse than I thought.” All of it—the whole situation—veering off in a terrible new direction.

  She tried to tell him how it had been, how she’d gone for a walk in the woods. Yes, she had seen Stan before anyone else had. She’d gone to town and tried to tell.

  “No,” Asa said firmly. “Any normal person stumbles across a dead man, the normal person doesn’t try, he tells someone.”

  “By the time I got to town, Dwight and Wendell were already out looking for him, and by the
time I finally saw them, he’d already been found. I didn’t see the point in getting myself involved.”

  “And why was that?”

  She had no answer and he didn’t wait for one. “Because you didn’t want me to figure out you’d closed my dam.” His voice cracked. “You wanted this to happen—the reservoir, your Sunday Standard glory, regardless of the cost.”

  “No, Asa.”

  “What, then? What? Dez, if that dirty Jew got you mixed up in something unsavory so he could get his hands on Dr. Proulx’s money, now is the time to wipe your breast clean.”

  “Asa, he did not,” she said vehemently. “Don’t talk about him that way!”

  “I’ll talk whatever way I want to talk!” But to her horror, his eyes were filling with tears.

  “It was just that Jacob was interested in the mechanics of it. He wanted to see how it worked, but once we closed it we couldn’t get the floodgate back up again. And he wasn’t even there when I found Stan. It was the next day. Jacob knew nothing about it. And also the job in New York has nothing to do with him. The only reason I didn’t tell you yet was because I had no idea Cascade was going to be chosen until Elliot Lowell told me, just last night.”

  “I know, I know. I heard it all.” He sat down on the sofa and dropped his head onto his hands. He’d rushed his trip to Hartford, he said. Skipped supper at Silas’s. But the drive back was slow-going. He got a flat tire outside Meredith, and by the time he got to the concert, the ceremony was over. Outside Town Hall, he overheard her speaking to Elliot Lowell.

  “I thought I heard something,” she said. “Where were you? Why didn’t you say something?” And how had he known where to find her?

  His voice grew cold again. “I was inside the front doorway overhang listening to everything. Lil had warned me, said they’d taken him and you’d gone running after him.” He batted at his eyes, upset with himself for getting emotional. “So I went down there. When I saw the two of you talking, I hid under the overhang. I’ve never felt so sick in my life. Hearing that the big decision’s been a sham. Hearing my wife say she’s been in the woods—my woods—with the peddler, with no thought to her reputation or mine, closing my dam. After you left and Lowell went back inside, I stood there thinking what to do. I thought, Well, Asa, you’ve lived with a whole pile of assumptions and none of them has ever been tested before. I went into the station, and I didn’t know who I wanted to punch first, that worm Lowell or your boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she whispered.

  “You’re right,” he said. “He’s not, not anymore. Now he knows what kind of person you are.”

  She turned to the window, blinking rapidly to keep from crying. Life had turned so ugly so quickly, yet the peonies bloomed, the river sparkled. “You should have married someone like Lil. I never really did understand why you wanted me.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been wondering that myself.”

  He wanted to hurt her, wanted to insult her. Fine. She deserved his disappointment, his anger, all of it. Get it all out of your system, she thought, looking into his left eye, hoping to make the usual connection.

  Both eyes regarded her coldly.

  “You can get a second chance,” she said. “Even if you don’t think that’s what you want right now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  It didn’t matter that she tried to explain her decision to leave in the calmest, kindest tone possible, he was adamant. “You need my consent for a divorce, and I am not going to be the kind of man whose wife divorces him.”

  “That’s just pride talking, Asa. Think. You can start over again with someone who deserves you.”

  “My pride seems to be all I have right now. Oh, wait. I own a playhouse, too, don’t I? That pile of wood you cherish is mine. And I can do what I want with it.”

  The telephone rang and she was grateful to escape to answer it. It was Dwight, his muffled voice saying they needed to see her. The state officers. A formality.

  She poked her head into the parlor; he hadn’t budged. He made no response when she said she had to go to town, so she shrank away and slipped upstairs to clean up. Her hands shook, turning the tap; she expected that her reflection in the mirror would be ghastly and pale. It was not. There was a flush to her cheeks; her eyes were bright and clear; she looked alive. She pressed her face so close to the mirror she could see the depths of her pupils, the ropelike vessels in the irises. She was organic matter—dust to dust—that would someday be gone, and she had to believe that this had all happened for a reason.

  From the pile of scattered clothes, she chose a gray plaid shift, the dress of a decent woman, and made noise going downstairs so Asa could call out if he wished; he did not.

  It was still early, nearly nine o’clock, a fresh, clear morning. In town, on the far side of the common, people streamed toward services at the Round Church. In the station, an officer she did not know, a man wearing the French-blue uniform of the state police, barely glanced up as she entered. He had taken over Dwight’s desk, and Dwight stood off to one side as if he didn’t know quite what to do with himself. The holding-cell door stood open, cot neatly made up with the gray blanket.

  Dwight leaned in confidentially. “We were satisfied with Jacob’s statements last night.” He introduced her to the sergeant, an irritable man named Malvoy. Months later, Dwight would tell her that Malvoy, based in Springfield, had been put out at having to come all the way to a backwater to investigate what was obviously an accidental drowning. The man’s interrogation of Dez basically boiled down to one sentence: “Did you and Mr. Jacob Solomon close that dam and in so doing, neglect to use the plank to cover the gap?”

  “We did,” she said, and when it was apparent that there was nothing more to say, he thanked her, shook his head, and said under his breath, “You were, after all, on your husband’s property.”

  Dwight offered to see Dez out; on the way he picked up the copy of the new Standard that sat on Wendell’s desk. They were silent climbing the stairs. Outside, they stood on the spot where she and Lowell had talked. She looked to the doorway where Asa had been hiding. “What happened after I left?” she asked.

  What happened, Dwight said, was that Asa staggered into the station like a stunned deer. “Honest to God, like he was full of buckshot. Jeez, I’d never seen him like that.”

  He must have been reeling from all the news at once—the gossip on the common, the cavalier way Lowell had struck his deal, the news that Cascade was doomed, that there had never, really, been a choice.

  “I thought he was going to start swinging, I really did. Jacob tried to calm things down. He was real up-front about taking responsibility. He said he just wanted to see how the pulleys worked, from a mechanical point of view.”

  “I know.”

  “And then—” He explained the rest. How Asa grabbed Jacob by the collar and said he’d paid four men to dig for four days. And his wife knew that. “And he wanted to know what Jacob had done to talk you into doing such a thing and why.” Dwight shifted uncomfortably. “See—Asa was wanting to blame Jacob, and Wendell was all for blaming Jacob, too, but I have to tell you, Dez, it seemed pretty obvious, to me, anyway, that Jacob was telling the truth.”

  She pressed her palms to the heat of her face. Would Jacob forgive this?

  “And then he tried to go after Lowell, accused him of lying to the town, already having made the choice. And Lowell denied having made any choice and said, ‘I’m going to insist you arrest this man if he touches me again.’”

  Asa backed off then, Dwight said. And Lowell said that whatever Jacob might have done, it wasn’t anything criminal, but he told him to do himself a favor and get out of town and stay out. “And he told Asa to get himself on home.”

  “What did Jacob tell Asa about New York?”

  Dwight shook his head doubtfully. “New York? Nothing.”

  So Asa lied. He knew about New York because he’d heard her tell Elliot Lowell. “And Jacob left
? That was it—he just left?”

  “Yeah. Gee, Dez, why did you want to close that dam?”

  What could she say? That she’d put a single crazy longing to touch another man before her husband, her town, before everyone and everything else? She wondered how it was that Dwight could still be so kind, letting her get away with not answering him.

  “After Jacob left, we kept Asa here to calm him down,” he said. “We didn’t want him going after Jacob.”

  “What time was all this?”

  “Still early. Eight.”

  She wished she could turn back the clock—just twenty-four hours, that was all it would take. She could be there when Asa came rushing back to see her receive the award only to see his life start to fall apart instead. Or she could tell Jacob that she had known about the dam, tell him right away, the minute she walked into the station.

  “What about Stan’s wife? Is she satisfied that it was an accident?”

  “Now there’s a hard-knock life.” Dwight sighed. “She’s not happy we didn’t find evidence of trouble, but we haven’t, and Lowell’s ready to sweep it all under the rug. What about you? What’s going to happen now?”

  She shook her head, blinking back emotion. “I don’t know.” She started to walk away—where she was going she did not know—but Dwight stopped her.

  “Hold on!”

  She turned back hopefully, as if he might possibly say something that would change anything, help anything. He held up the Standard. “Would you mind autographing this?”

  29

  She ended up in the only place left that felt like sanctuary—the playhouse, where she paced the aisles, her thoughts a scramble, all of them edged with uncertainty. Uncertainty, the hardest state of mind to bear. She had to take stock of her situation. Jacob might want nothing more to do with her. She might have crossed the line with Asa; he might never return to being the reasonable man she knew. She supposed she would have to go stay in the hotel. She would have to be ready for the gossip, the frosty looks, the way people would cross streets and duck into doorways to avoid having to acknowledge her. She breathed in the old-wood smell of the playhouse—surely Asa wouldn’t see it destroyed, just to hurt her. The only good thing about a pregnancy would be that the playhouse would belong to the child. A child of the union, her father had stipulated. But the thought of pregnancy made something in her rise up hysterically. She couldn’t be pregnant, she simply couldn’t. A woman living alone with a baby in New York, living anywhere in the world, would have a difficult time of it without family, without at the very least a nurse, and could she make enough to pay for a nurse? Would that be the cruelest manifestation of irony—that she’d end up sunk in the endless toil of baby-caring? She’d envisioned her job at the Standard providing the means to spend her free hours on her painting, hours that a baby would suck dry.