Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  “Yes,” she said, forcing herself to say no more, to make no promises. He helped her up the stairs and into her seat and pecked her briefly on the cheek, his lips cool and dry. He made a movement with his head that was both a shake and a nod, then climbed back down the narrow steps to wait on the platform.

  Through the window, she met his eyes. Looking too happy would be cruel, but she couldn’t look mournful. She adopted what she hoped was a bucking-up, businesslike expression every time their eyes caught until finally, blessedly, the engineer blew two long whistles, then two short ones. The train began to grind out of the station, slowly at first. Asa raised his arm, eyes fastened on Dez, his figure quickly shrinking as the train rolled forward. She waved without looking directly at him. She was too afraid she would change her mind, that she would get off in Hartford and jump on the next train back, blubbering with cowardice and guilt. The train rolled past the common, past the back of the playhouse, which she glimpsed with a catch in her throat, then plunged into the woods, running along the river, taking her with it, moving her away from Massachusetts for the first time in almost five years. Miles passed, miraculously fast, farmers’ walls and birch groves a streaming blur.

  She had known she would feel grief, regret, and fear at this moment, and she did feel all that, but as the train sped up, rushing and clacketing along the tracks, the woods and countryside falling away, she felt something else more fully: the lightness, the exhilaration, the chest-expanding relief of finally moving forward.

  30

  In spite of the increasingly urgent murmurings coming from across the Atlantic, Dez did not understand what had truly happened to Jacob during that brief, fluttering period of scandal in Cascade. It wouldn’t be until the Life story came out four years later, after the success of The Black Veil, when her life would have already changed so vastly, that she would really recognize the extent of the isolation Jacob must have felt that night a town pointed its collective finger at him. In the beginning, new in New York, she just wanted to find him.

  She was only half an hour into the train journey when Cascade and her months as Mrs. Asa Spaulding began to feel as remote as the plot of a half-remembered movie. A staid porter maneuvered a tea cart down the aisle, and Dez was reminded of her school days, when she used to travel alone, by train, back to Farmington. No matter how morose she felt at the station—her father bending down to kiss her cheek, slipping some wrapped surprise into her pocket, assuring her that Christmas was just around the corner—she would, within minutes of the train’s departure, be strangely happy to be exactly where she was: in her own company and settled into her plush velvet seat, face turned to the window.

  She was enveloped by that sense of self-sufficiency, arriving in New York late Monday afternoon. How easy to disembark amid the fumes and noise of Penn Station, to tip the porter, to hail a hackney cab and find her way to the Barbizon Women’s Hotel on East Sixty-third Street. Easy to register, to explain that she would just be staying a couple of nights. Easy to fall asleep on clean cotton sheets, ears filled with the muffled sound of car horns and footsteps and voices. And easy to spend Tuesday exploring flats with the apartment representative recommended by the Barbizon desk clerk.

  By three o’clock, she had chosen a one-room, furnished flat with bath on West Seventy-fourth Street between Central Park and the Hudson River. It cost fifteen dollars and fifty cents a week, more than she thought she would have to pay, but it was safe and clean, with three large windows that let in a steady north light. She crossed her fingers that the job at The American Sunday Standard would be hers for as long as she wanted it, for the first time feeling for herself the undercurrent of anxiety that had plagued people everywhere these past years: How much worse can things get? If I have a job, how long can I keep it? What will I do if I lose it?

  Back at the Barbizon, she tucked inside one of the phone booths off the lobby. She perched on the small seat and counted out nickels from her purse, depositing one into the slot and waiting for the operator to take the call.

  It was four o’clock. Mrs. Raymond would have gone home; Asa was likely alone in the drugstore, puttering in the back room, or mixing a soft drink for a late-afternoon straggler. Her stomach pitched with dread, waiting through the connections, until his voice came through, faint but clear, “Spaulding Drug.”

  His response to her announcement—“I’ve found an apartment”—was silence, a blind chasm that she talked into, her voice like an echo, providing the address, explaining that there was no lease, the agreement was tenant-at-will. She wasn’t sure if the nonbinding agreement was for his sake—indulging the pretense that she was in New York temporarily—or if it was a means of giving herself a way out. She hoped she wouldn’t resort to that, whatever happened. Wouldn’t resort to the weak way out.

  “Asa?” If only he would say something. “Do you hear me?”

  Finally, he spoke. “I’m just wondering how long it’s going to take you to get this out of your system.”

  She pulled the receiver from her ear and looked at it a moment. It was a thing, a piece of hard, black Bakelite. She was tempted to simply hang it up, but when she put it back to her ear, he was already gone.

  The new flat occupied the fourth floor of a late-nineteenth-century sandstone building. It contained a brown plaid armchair, a maple bureau, a narrow bed. A drop-leaf table and ladder-back chair crowded the minuscule kitchen, which consisted of a sink, a single burner plate, and an icebox connected by an ice chute to the back landing that ran the length of the building. A red-and-white-checked oilcloth skirt, tacked beneath the short countertop, tidily concealed the basics that were all anyone needed: fry pan, saucepan, two plates, two cups, two glasses, and some assorted cutlery. There was a surprisingly large closet, obviously part of some long-ago bedroom, before the fourth floor was carved into apartments. The bath was old, with a plain white peg-leg sink and small, footed tub, but it was functional and private, and that was all that counted. By eleven o’clock the next morning, Dez had paid the super and moved in, her trunk dragged up the four flights by a portly, red-faced driver the Barbizon desk clerk had called. The man grunted and complained with every step until he heaved the trunk over the threshold. Dez paid him quickly, eager to be rid of him, to be alone. She listened to his footsteps fade away down the stairs then sat on the edge of the bed, surveying the tiny space. Her own little room. A fluttering passed through her chest—fear that she might regret what she was doing, hope that she was indeed doing the right thing. And like an underpinning to every thought, the ever-present, pulsating concern that she had been careless, that after all this, she might find herself pregnant. Here, in new surroundings, feeling physically no different than she ever had, the idea seemed both absurd and terrifying, so unnerving it made her jump to her feet. She couldn’t be. And she simply had to stop thinking about it.

  She opened the windows and peered down through the leafy trees to the sidewalk below. It was hard to believe she was two hundred miles away from Cascade, that the river light that filled this street was from the Hudson, that just weeks ago, she could never have imagined that mid-July would find her living in New York. Hard to believe that Jacob was out there, somewhere close by. Abby was out there, too, and what to do about that? Yes, Abby had tried to usurp Dez’s place at the magazine, and that seemed unforgivable, but Dez was also a bit uncertain about her own role as guilty party. She had, after all, assumed ownership of the Postcards from America idea.

  She unlocked her trunk and took stock of the blouses and skirts and carefully wrapped tools. Most of what mattered had managed to fit inside such a small space. A narrow built-in bookshelf in the east corner of the room took Portia’s box and the few books she’d packed, including her collected Shakespeare, the Chinese fortune carefully tucked inside Sonnet 116. She set her tack box, her stretching tools, and her good brushes on the kitchen table, which would have to serve as workspace for the time being. She would need a new easel. Her clothes, though she had carefully rolled
them, shook out all wrinkled. She would need to buy a hot-iron. Oh, and wire hangers. The hooks in the closet held only two.

  She had been unsure what to do about her paintings, and in the end, lugged along her best ones, too afraid to chance their destruction. Everything else she stored in the playhouse. She lifted out Twilight, Cascade Common, and unwrapped it. It would look good by the door but she would need a hammer, nails. She started a list of things to buy. Sheets for the bed. Towels. Turpentine. Linseed oil. Sugar and salt and oil and tea. And Rose. She would have to call Rose at some point, confide in her.

  Her wedding band flashed as she wrote—probably time to take it off. She had signed all her postcard paintings “Desdemona Hart” and it would be just as well to be known as Miss Hart once she began work. “Mrs. Spaulding” would raise questions. She didn’t want the stigma of divorce imposed on her and yet she could hardly betray Asa by calling herself a widow. The benign “Miss” seemed the best choice. She slid the ring off her finger and rubbed it against her thumb knuckle like a worry stone. Of course, if it turned out she was pregnant, she would have some revising to do, perhaps let on that Miss Hart was a kind of pseudonym. But she would worry about that if the time came to worry about it.

  The last time Dez had visited New York was in the fall of 1928, and as busy as the city was then, it seemed to have grown more hectic. A vast bridge, made completely of steel, now spanned the Hudson, allowing a flood of cars to pour onto the island each morning. Taxis joined the cars in clogging the streets, and their drivers all seemed to be in a contest to see who could blow his horn the longest. Dance palaces, billiard halls, and movie palaces all blazed with electric light. Street peddlers sold anything they could get their hands on—apples, pencils, neckties—and every block had its shoeshine boys, even though many were old men sitting patiently on their wooden boxes, shine kits at their feet. Everywhere was stark contrast: bread lines so long they snaked around corners at the same time that women wearing smart hats stepped out of taxis to enter the dozens of restaurants that seemed to be doing a thriving business despite the hard times.

  Dez walked down to the new Empire State Building, tallest in the world, as soon as she had settled in, just to gawk at it, at its modern, stainless-steel entrance canopies, at its sleek, tapered sides, which led up to an observatory that maybe she would visit with Jacob, once she’d found him. She remembered reading about its official opening a few years back, how President Hoover was able to light up the entire 1,250 floors by pressing a single button in Washington, D.C. What an extravagance it seemed, to build such a thing in the middle of an economic depression. Dizzying, to peer up at its needle top. Much of it still stood empty, said a man who paused to join her in admiring it. “Tenants are few and far between, they say. People are calling it the Empty State Building, but you have to admire its permanence, don’t you?” he said. “It’s not going anywhere, is it?”

  It certainly wasn’t, Dez agreed. No bulldozer would ever barge in and push that aside to make way for something else.

  The man tipped his hat and walked on, and she realized that she liked the un-self-conscious way New Yorkers said what they felt like saying and then moved on. Her immediate neighbors in the apartment building were like that, too, much more open than people she had known in Paris and Boston. One of them was Walter Munroe, a retired carpenter who salvaged scraps of discarded lumber from construction yards and built bookcases for a vendor down on Second Avenue. One of the first things he asked when he met Dez on the stairs her second day in the apartment was did she need a bookcase? No, she said, but she could use an easel. Within days, Walter had built her a beauty: smooth, solid mahogany with a pull-out drawer and foldable legs. He sold it for not much more than the cost of the wood, and hammered a metal plate to the back of it, on which, when Dez inspected it, he had hand-etched his name. Walter Francis Xavier Munroe.

  Everyone wanted to put their mark to something.

  Another neighbor was an older Russian woman, Maria Petrova, who spoke with a careful, lilting accent and sewed satin wedding dresses and long veils of imported lace for Bonwit Teller. She was lucky, she said, that the people who bought her gowns at Bonwit’s were people who always had money, regardless of the state of the world. Her flat, bigger than Dez’s by two rooms, was crammed with tall bolts of satin and silk that Dez fingered the day she was invited in to drink red tea in a glass. At night, while Dez painted or sketched or read a magazine, she could hear Maria’s grandson Boris, a gawky boy sprouting first whiskers, scratch at the violin.

  Every morning, she caught the 8:15 trolley the thirty-one blocks down to Forty-third Street and rode the elevator up to the Standard’s editorial offices on the twenty-third floor. Bobby, the elevator operator, always greeted her with compliments. “Your postcards make me feel I’ve gone home, Miss. You’d think you knew Alsdale, Pennsylvania, that’s how much your Cascade looks like home.”

  It was strange to be Miss Hart again.

  Miss Hart. She could almost believe in her existence. She was put to work with other illustrators, writers, and reporters in the large corner wing at the west end of the floor. Her drawing space sat around the corner from Mr. Washburn’s office, adjacent to a steam radiator and a double-hung window with a view to the brick building next door. In addition to a desk, she was given an easel and a drawing table. One of the junior illustrators, a boy fresh from art school, introduced himself the first day. His name was Simon Turcott, and something about his youthful shyness, the hair he nervously pushed out of his eyes, made her warm to him. He was there to give her the pencils and paper she needed and get her to write up a list of supplies she wanted from Mason’s Art Store, he said. “This place is like a dream,” he confided. “They give you anything you want.”

  That first day, she confided in Mr. Washburn, who was as warm and cordial in real life as she had imagined, someone with whom she felt instantly comfortable. She was actually married, she said, and her married name was Spaulding; future checks would have to be made out to her in that name. The Cascade bank had no problem cashing a check made out to Desdemona Hart, but any account she opened in New York would have to be in her legal name. She let Mr. Washburn assume that her husband would join her eventually, but said that publicly she would like to be known as Miss Hart. Less invasive for her husband, she said, a vague excuse that required no real explanation.

  Mr. Washburn leaned toward plumpness but somehow managed to look both compact and extremely tidy. He was delighted that she had arrived earlier than August, and especially delighted with the “Letter from the Commissioner” idea, with the fact that the Standard would have obviously scooped the news. He planned a two-page spread: her postcard to the left, the commissioner’s letter, official seal replicated, to the right.

  So it was decided. Her next project would be the “decision” card, and she would depict the scene that would likely take place in Cascade on announcement day. Lowell and the rest of the water board would speak from the steps of Town Hall. A crowd would be gathered on the common. Photographers from Boston and Springfield and Worcester would be there, flashbulbs popping, to record the moment. And around the common, everything that would soon be bulldozed—the tall pines and maples, the Round Church, the Town Hall, the library—would serve as solid backdrop, as if for eternity.

  31

  Where was Jacob? On buses, on sidewalks, Dez’s eyes searched the streets and crowds for him. At night, when her apartment building quieted down, when Boris put his violin away, when Walter stopped his hammering, when the only sounds she heard were the sounds she herself made, she settled into her bed, ears tuned as if she might be able to discern his whereabouts by listening.

  That first full week in New York, she used her lunch hours to look for him. One day she paid for a taxi to wait at the Columbus Street W.P.A. office while she ran inside to see if Jacob’s address could be found and given out. The office was oppressive in the July heat, crowded with people and their smells of perspiration and hair oil and ciga
rette smoke and something strangely dry and dusty, like pencil shavings. There was a line, she immediately saw, a line she would have to wait in. She toyed with running back outside to tell the taxi to go, but three more people walked in; the line would only get longer. After wasting a precious twenty minutes inching forward, it was finally her turn. A harried man with sweat glistening on his forehead and spectacles sliding down his nose told her that applications were still being processed, that artists were in the process of securing their necessary paperwork—letters of approval from senators and such—and in any event (and here he looked at her with a wide-eyed gaze that said she must be insane), he couldn’t simply pore through hundreds of applications to find the one address she was seeking. If this person was her friend, he said skeptically, wouldn’t he find her anyway?

  She spent a second lunch hour switching into her rubber-soled canvas painting shoes so she could run, literally, up to the Art Students League, even though she had to endure the glances and snickering that her footwear provoked. The young woman manning the front desk had no idea who Jacob Solomon was, and spent a few minutes paging through some kind of roster before looking up with a shrug of regret. Dez peered beyond the woman’s desk, down a nondescript hallway that led to the studios. People shuffled in and out, carrying satchels and bags, and she had to remind herself this was the Art Students League, this was what she wanted: to be with other artists, to paint, to take classes. She glanced at the clock. No time to sign up now. She headed back to work, left with only the hope that Jacob would get in touch with her through the Standard. She couldn’t remember if she’d told him exactly when the Standard was expecting her in New York, but surely he knew to contact her through the magazine, regardless.

  Of course, the real fear that settled in and refused to let her relax was that he had decided not to contact her at all, that her lapse in telling the whole truth that last night in Cascade had hardened his heart.