Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  But maybe she was not pregnant, maybe she was worrying over something that not only had not happened but would not happen. There is a good possibility I am not pregnant, she told herself. The thought was like being washed with sweet, cool water, but only briefly, and she knew she would go for weeks like this, alternating between dread and the airy possibility of escape, until she knew one way or the other. And if she was pregnant, well, there were ways, early on—strong medicines you could take, though the specifics were foggy and wrapped in old-folklore feminine mystery. Rose might know—but no, she couldn’t do that kind of thing, she just had to pray she wasn’t. God, how had she gotten to this point? Just one child will make a difference in your life that you can’t imagine. What was more a sign of fate than a baby? Maybe she was meant to have a baby, and twenty years from now she would know why and all would be clear to her. But oh, it was too bad children couldn’t be born already school-age and independent. She might not mind that so much, might welcome the kind of little companion she’d been to her father. What would his life have been like if the flu had taken Dez along with Timon and her mother, that terrible autumn? William Hart had died depending on her to make sure his legacy lived on. She would have to remain friendly with Asa. She would have to find some way to move the building—hound Lowell, save and scrape. Once she was in New York, she could seek out people with means who might help.

  She climbed up to the thrust stage and walked across the boards, each footstep echoing up to the rafters. The ceiling paint had begun to peel in small, hanging spirals. She closed her eyes, wanting to reminisce, but she was too restless for that indulgence, and put her hands to her hips and looked around. How was a building moved, anyway? Would they take it apart and put it back together? Number each board, load them onto a truck, and cart them away? Or would they chain it whole to a flatbed, drag it inch by inch, yard by yard, the many miles it would take to reach a new home?

  With a start, she heard the creak of dry hinges and peered down the rows of seats to the arched entryway. A man’s figure appeared in silhouette, making his way down the aisle. Asa.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  Dez slid off the stage, landing on her feet. At least the scary, out-of-character anger was gone from his voice.

  “I want to make a deal,” he said.

  “What kind of deal?”

  His eyes flickered angrily. “The kind of deal you had no problem making with Lowell, that kind. A deal that benefits both of us.”

  “What kind of deal?” she asked again.

  “This kind: people are already talking, and maybe you don’t care about your reputation, but I care about mine, and whether you like it or not, we’re tied together. Now, you want to see this playhouse saved,” he said. “And I can say yea or nay to that.”

  She nodded for him to go on.

  “I want us to join forces, to present a united face as a couple over the next few days and weeks. To stop the talk in its tracks. I was just over at the Brilliant, and I let everyone who was there having breakfast know that my silly trusting wife had been talked into helping this conniver Solomon close up my dam. Everyone’s already talking about how he must have known he was in for money if the state was forced to purchase Addis Proulx’s land.”

  “But that’s not true.”

  “People believe it. And those people will tell more people, and if we stand by that story, stick together, then our reputations stay intact.”

  “What about Jacob’s reputation?”

  “Dez. Get something through your head. I don’t care about Jacob Solomon. They’re already thinking the worst of him. He doesn’t live here. I’ve lived here all my life and I will not become the butt of rumors and scandal and snickering.”

  “I understand your position, but I can’t lie, Asa.”

  “You already have lied, Dez. Countless times.”

  She swallowed; she couldn’t deny it.

  “You don’t have to say anything, just be by my side in the coming days and this will all die down soon enough, what with what we’re all facing anyway. Can you do that for my sake, for my reputation? For the sake of this playhouse?”

  “You wouldn’t see this place destroyed, Asa.”

  “Oh, really? You forget that no one else cares about it the way you do.”

  She looked up at the strapwork ceiling, the painted gilt lion. Life is a stage and all the people merely players. He was blackmailing her, essentially. She had to make herself calm, remove emotion from the situation, gauge the long view.

  “I can make things very difficult. I can go after him,” he said, “for trespassing, for damages.”

  “You’re not that kind of person, I know you’re not.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Dez. I’ve been naïve, but no more. I’m done.”

  “Asa, why would you want to be married to me if the only way you could have me was through blackmail? What kind of a marriage is that?” She tried to tell him, with her eyes, that she was serious, serious and sorry. “I’m going to New York. I have to give it a try.”

  He lifted his chin. “I’m only asking you to stick by me for the next few weeks,” he said. “Is that so much to ask?”

  “You mean put on a show while we live under the same roof? Oh, Asa, no. I’ll go to Mrs. Mayhew for the next couple of weeks. That’s what I’ve decided.”

  His hand came slamming down onto the stage, even as he managed to control his voice. “This has come at me out of the blue. The reservoir, you—all of it. If you leave in the midst of all this talk, well, then, in for a penny in for a pound, so they say. You let them tear down our reputations, I will let them tear down this playhouse, I promise you. And I won’t give you a divorce, if that’s what you’re after. I won’t do it. But if you can manage,” he said, jerking his head to one side to hide his eyes, gone suddenly shiny and wet, “to show some consideration for me, and let me hold my head up in this town, then I might let you decide what to do with this place. I might allow that.”

  She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “It will be awkward, living together in the house, knowing it’s a sham,” she said.

  “More awkward,” he said, “to have the whole town whispering and talking behind our backs.”

  Later, she would look back on that agreement, on how odd and businesslike and false it was even as she went through with it, spending the next weeks parading around town with Asa, plowing through those days conscious of her inner eye observing in dismay, constantly off-kilter, like stepping sideways.

  They were not apart once, and she often caught Asa looking at her with concentration, as if he was trying to figure something out. They did things they had never done. They worked the fountain together. They hand-delivered prescriptions to the outlying towns and farms. They watched double-features—The 39 Steps, Mutiny on the Bounty. She overheard Jacob’s name on people’s lips—talk that died as soon as the speaker spied the Spauldings.

  The closest she came to calling the whole deal off was the Thursday night they spent at the Brilliant. It was a mild, golden evening, and the Brilliant was bustling. Ike and Helen Whitby encouraged people to congregate there, even if they ordered only water, to talk about the reservoir. Everyone was rumbling about the threat and the dismal economy and the ineffectuality, or not, of President Roosevelt. At one point, there was a squabble about the latest buzz, something Charles Lindbergh was reported to have said: that the greatest danger of Jewish power lay in their ownership and influence in motion pictures and press and radio and government. “Damn right,” Dick Adams blustered as the door jangled and Al Stein and his wife, Judith, walked in. Dick’s back was to the Steins, and no one took any particular notice of their entrance, though the few who did notice said hello as the couple took stools at the far end of the counter, near the big plate window that looked out onto Main Street.

  “Rosenfeld’s toadies are ruining our lives,” Dick said, waiting for the spattered laughter that the bastardization of Roosevelt’s name usuall
y got. “They took us off the gold standard, they’re printing money at will, they’re manipulating everything we see and do. Decent men like Bud and I can’t get a job, and this takeover of our town? It’s all about money. Right, Bud?”

  Bud, sitting with his wife at the counter, looked embarrassed and took a sip of his water. “I dunno, Dick.”

  “Well, what did you see last night?” Pete Masterson nodded toward Dez and Asa, a serious nod, as if their answer would prove Dick right.

  “See?”

  “At the Criterion.”

  “Mutiny on the Bounty,” Asa said, looking confused.

  “There you go,” Dick said. “Bligh: Thalberg’s version of Hitler. Thalberg’s a Jew. Wants to stir things up, wants what Rosenfeld wants: renounce capitalism, sell us all out to communism.”

  Asa eyeballed both Pete and Dick to point out Al and Judith, who sat stiffly at the counter. Pete shrugged to show he wasn’t sorry.

  “You can’t blame everything on the New Deal, Dick,” Asa said.

  “You mean the Jew Deal. But hey, at least there’s one less Jew around for you to worry about, Asa.”

  Only Dez knew how infuriated he was, how much effort it took for him to stay calm, to rise and suggest to Dez that they get going.

  During those awkward weeks, she hoped she would hear from Jacob; she did not. Two weeks after the worst of the gossip had finally died down, she gathered courage and phoned his house, praying that he or his sister or one of the children would pick up the line. Instead, the old woman answered and, recognizing Dez’s voice, went into a tirade. “I don’t talk to nobody from Cascade.” Pronouncing it Cas-ked. “He good man, always good. You to drown, I say—” and here she said something guttural and blunt in another language and hung up.

  Dez hung up herself, trembling. Jacob was most likely in New York by now anyway. She would find him when she got there. She would find him and explain and apologize. She prayed that she would not have to confess to a pregnancy.

  The idea obsessed her. Every night, she held her palm over her stomach, trying to detect some sign of life. In the morning she stood sideways and peered at her abdomen in the long mahogany pedestal mirror next to the closet, looking for signs. There was no swelling. Her breasts—did she imagine they were more tender than usual? She couldn’t tell. She gnawed herself into such anxiety over the possibility that anxiety became something like resignation. If she was to be pregnant, she wanted the baby to be Jacob’s, and that was a wish that originated somewhere deep inside. She wasn’t sure how she would get through nine months of uncertainty, but trusted that once the baby was born, she would know. A dark-haired, dark-eyed baby would belong to Jacob, and she and Jacob would manage. At least that was what she thought when she was feeling optimistic. Other times, she remembered the day he said she reminded him of Rosetti’s Beatrice, that personification of purity and love. She had once searched the Cascade library, trying, in vain, to find a reproduction of that painting.

  She felt so far from pure.

  She kept up with her cards for the Standard: a historic look at an early Independence Day celebration one hundred years ago, paired with a speculative view of the proposed reservoir in twenty-five years—1960, a date that seemed as remote and unreal as 1860 seemed now.

  June drew to a close. The talk about Jacob and Dez died down, as Asa had declared it would. In his desire to suppress gossip, he did not tell anyone about overhearing Lowell confirm that Cascade was doomed. Zeke returned from a trip to Boston on July 1 and mentioned that his friend at the State House thought the deal was sealed: Cascade would be chosen. People gathered in the streets, in the Handy and the Brilliant and in Spaulding Drug and the Criterion Theater to talk, to mull over what was fact and what was still speculation.

  The first week of July, none of the week’s newsreels were light. One delivered news of another dust storm in northern Kansas—spotted, crackling pictures that revealed a black sky raining dirt as a single car tried to escape it. Another announced that the Führer had decreed the Mauser K98k to be the main battle rifle of the Third Reich. The third posed a question: Would Japan, too, adopt fascism? The news was the sort that usually made people want to hunker down in their homes, but now Cascade faced homelessness, displacement, and for its residents, public places had become more homelike, more comforting, than wood-and-shingle dwellings that could soon fall to bulldozers. A newsreel team filmed the Independence Day picnic on Cascade Common, festivities that were somewhat frenzied, everyone knowing that they could be the last festivities the common saw.

  With focus off her, Dez felt ready to slip away to New York, but at night she couldn’t quite believe that she would really go. She knew she must, that she would never get another chance if she did the weak, safe thing now. She fought sentimentality every day. Soon I will never climb these steps again, never open this cupboard, turn this faucet, turn down this bed. At night, she lay awake, Asa asleep beside her, her heart quietly beating. Only so many beats in one lifetime. She tried to grasp what it would be like to sleep somewhere else, in a strange bed in a building she didn’t yet know. New York was real, with smells and sounds and sidewalks, but until you were actually in a place, that place felt inaccessible, static.

  She vacillated, but most of the time she was afraid to go. She was afraid to board the train and head off to the unknown. She would have to find a place to live; she would have to get all her belongings there; she still had to hound Lowell about moving the playhouse. She sent him a reminder, and received a terse “working on it” note in reply. In her worst moments, she was so overwhelmed that she was close to calling off the move. It would be so easy, so safe, to stay with Asa, who had turned out to be so tolerant, in his way. She would turn her head and watch him sleep, his chest rising up and down, and marvel at how people could remain so committed to institutions and rules. To him, she was his wife in the most legal sense of the term. If he could turn back time, would he still want to marry her? She thought the answer would be no. So why did he want to hold on? He had made no move to touch her, but he wanted her in their bedroom because they were still married. He predicted she would get to New York and regret it. “You’ll be home within a month,” he said. In the meantime, he had no intention of letting people know the truth and planned to say that she was working on a project down in New York, a project with vague deadlines.

  Dez indulged him. She packed a single trunk and conceded that he might very well be right. Asa told her that he had looked into where she should stay, and that the best place was the Barbizon, known as a safe haven for independent women in the city.

  A hotel stay was temporary by its very nature. Dez had no intention of living in a hotel. She would feel settled, able to truly judge living on her own, in the city, only in her own place. But she didn’t tell him that, and she turned down the money he pressed on her until he insisted; Dez was still his wife. He was hardly going to let his wife go off without funds.

  Her leave-taking on the morning of July 15 was calm and without theatrics or animosity, but it was strange. Strange to have Asa carry her trunk downstairs and load it into the Buick. Strange to inhale the fresh morning air, the kind of air that promised a lazy summer day, and climb into the car thinking how unnecessary this really was. No one was making her move. She didn’t have to move. She rested her hands in her lap, feeling an acute sense of embarrassment, as if she were drawing attention to herself in a way that was melodramatic and unjustified.

  Asa was quiet in the car. She supposed he hadn’t really believed it would come to this. He grimly started the engine and drove down the driveway. I’m really leaving, she thought with rising panic.

  They traveled down River Road, past the decaying summer homes. Would she see them again? They could start tearing places like this down very soon. The car rumbled over the Cascade River bridge and she talked about the Standard to fill the silence. It was a good thing she would be able to sit in on all the early meetings, she said. She didn’t know that she would be able t
o do the series, otherwise. “Mr. Washburn said the editorial board’s been so pleased with my Cascade work that they really want me to guide the direction of the new series. It’s an honor, don’t you think?”

  Asa nodded noncommittally. He turned left onto Spruce Street and pulled up in front of the train station. He got out and came around to Dez’s side of the car to open the door. “Hopefully,” he said, “the new series will do more for the country than the other one did for Cascade.”

  Her eyes smarted as he walked into the station to get the porter, part of her close to saying, What am I doing? Drive me home. He returned with Albie Ray, the stunted little porter, who hefted her trunk onto a dolly and wheeled it away. They walked through the waiting room and onto the platform. The train was already on the tracks, quivering and throwing off heat like some fire-breathing beast. Asa appeared at once stoic and resigned and hopeful and bewildered. “So,” he said, his voice louder than necessary, speaking for the sake of other people nearby. “I guess you’ll go get your work done and let me know what’s going on,” he said.