Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  Or perhaps he hadn’t come to New York after all. She got out the Chinese fortune and ran her fingers over the words. An invisible thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.

  In any case, at the very least, he had to be looking at the postcard series each week.

  She spent Saturday morning in the reference library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, requesting book after book of color plates until she found it: a hand-colored print of the Rossetti painting Jacob had seen in London. The Death of Beatrice, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the painting, Beatrice kneels, face upturned, eyes closed in a kind of entreaty.

  The plate’s accompanying text explained that the painting depicted the mystical transformation of Beatrice from earth to heaven. In the background, to Beatrice’s left, a figure in a red robe was Dante himself. To her right, a luminous sundial read nine, the hour of her death on June 9, 1290. A red bird, messenger of death, delivered a poppy, symbol of sleep, into her open hands.

  The reproduction was good; you could see how it must, in real life, somewhere in London, glow with light, the way Jacob said it did. She studied it a long time. She duplicated its lines in a careful sketch, made note of its colors. Then she went home to rework the “decision” postcard.

  On Monday, she packed a small bag with a belt and sanitary napkin and tucked it into her purse, even though she did not yet feel any cramping and, in any case, wasn’t truly expecting anything until Tuesday, or even Wednesday. Each day that week, she forced herself to be calm, to sit on the toilet and expect, quietly, to see bright crimson, and each day she forced herself to remain calm when she did not. By Thursday she was telling herself that any slight delay could be due to the pressure of moving. Body functions always took a while to regulate after traveling. And besides, she felt no different. There had been no nausea, no bloating. There is absolutely no sign that I am pregnant, she told herself that day. She was in the ladies’ washroom, and when she looked up from the sink and glanced at her reflection in the mirror, she saw how anxious and drawn she looked. She needed to relax and focus on the everyday, and that way, when she wasn’t even thinking about it, the familiar cramping would return.

  Martha, the afternoon receptionist, popped her head into the washroom. “You’ve got a telegram,” she said. “I left it on your desk.”

  The telegram was from Elliot Lowell, confirming that the water board would indeed make its formal announcement in Cascade the next morning, Friday, July 26, at ten o’clock.

  The day dawned humid and cloudless. Cascade was on Dez’s mind all morning, as she dressed and rode the trolley, as she sat down at her desk. She thought, the way she did at least once a minute now, about the fact that she still hadn’t started bleeding, and that if she was indeed pregnant, she would have to do something. She couldn’t remain Miss Hart.

  She completed her first “America” postcard; Mr. Washburn had chosen the story that had haunted them both the most: the town in Arkansas where the farms literally dried up and blew away. She painted the farm buildings sepia and ghostly, with a creek sucked dry and livestock nearly transparent, vanishing in the wind. Farm buildings, with wet sheets pinned to the windows, looked miniaturized in contrast to the giant, pulverizing dust clouds, the black sky raining dirt. Those people in Arkansas would consider Cascade fortunate.

  At one o’clock, she got up to stretch and stood gazing out the window at the brick-faced back of the building next door. Above the roofline was clear sky, the same sky that looked down on Cascade a couple of hundred miles away. The crowd on the common would have dispersed, but people would have gathered in other places, to rehash, to worry, to weep, and to grumble. At lunchtime, she slipped into a telephone booth at the coffee shop on Forty-third Street to phone Asa at the drugstore. They hadn’t spoken since a week ago Tuesday, since the day at the Barbizon, but he sounded better than she’d expected, almost happy to hear from her. The coffee shop was so full of noise and bustle that in spite of the closed booth, she had to cup the receiver hard against her ear to hear him.

  “I was just wondering how the town is taking the news.” She had to speak loudly; it was noisy at the drugstore, too. “And to see how you’re taking it.”

  “Between the rumors and leaks,” Asa said, “no one was surprised. Everyone’s resigned, I guess.”

  She reminded him that the decision card would be published in Sunday’s issue. “It’ll be obvious I knew all along and I suppose my name will be mud, but you’re free to act as surprised as anyone.”

  He was so quiet she thought she had lost the connection, and was about to click for the operator when he said, in such a subdued voice she had to strain to hear, “It’s all very awkward, isn’t it?”

  It was. Yes. “It is,” she said.

  “It’s all going to happen very fast.” In the coming weeks, he said, representatives from the state would begin to draw up contracts with landowners. “They’ve already begun construction of a diversion tunnel. Over off Route Thirteen, near the golf course.”

  A diversion tunnel, a first step in diverting water from one place to another. “How can they get away with starting construction so soon?”

  “The state was quietly buying up more land than anyone knew the last two years. Oh, there are some holdouts, people who swear they’ll never move. March Pierce, the Wellses. But everyone knows eventually we’ll all be history.” They were both quiet a moment. “When are you coming back, Dez?”

  She hesitated. “I’ll be busy with this new project for weeks.”

  “They say we’ll have a year, at least, to leave, but the sooner we start packing everything up, the better. Weed things out.” He talked about relocation possibilities—a lot of people were looking at Belchertown. He had always liked Belchertown—did she?

  God, no. Belchertown was a small town even farther away from Worcester and Boston than Cascade. She felt herself fill with panic and despair just to imagine living there. She couldn’t be pregnant; she could never go back there; where was Jacob? He must not want me, she thought. Maudlin, pathetic lament. “Whatever you like is fine with me.”

  There was a burst of static on the line. The drugstore was packed, no one wanted to go home, she heard him say before the connection went dead.

  The next day the Standard published the “Decision: Cascade” spread with an editor’s note: now that the decision had been made, the feature would be changing format. Once a month, they would publish the Cascade Progress Report. Other weeks would be devoted to a new feature, Postcards from America. The editors urged readers to enter ideas and photographs for postcards that told dramatic stories of their own small towns.

  “Decision: Cascade” hit the public consciousness at the right time. Newspapers across the country picked up the story. The announcement of Postcards from America added to the collective sense of anticipation. On Sunday night, The Gallagher Radio Hour mentioned it. Dez was leaning out her window, looking down on all the people who had escaped the humid night to sit on their front stoops, when she heard it on the radio perched on the ledge below. “Imagine,” she heard one man say, “flooding a whole town like that. I grew up in a town like that Cascade.”

  On Monday, Bobby, the elevator boy, called for the twenty-third floor and said, “You might have been drawing Alsdale, Miss. I liked the library best, the tiny books through the windows.”

  “Decision: Cascade” also contained this detail: a woman standing by the playhouse, in front of a tiny easel on which was displayed a miniature reproduction of the Rossetti Beatrice portrait. Only in Dez’s version there was no red bird. Instead, Beatrice’s hands released a white bird, olive branch in its mouth.

  However Jacob felt, he had to be reading the Standard, she was sure of it. She waited for him to send her a note via the magazine, something that would at least acknowledge her presence. She left her address with the doorman at the Standard’s offices, explaining that an old friend
might come looking for her.

  She waited through the weekend, imagining she felt a baby’s presence inside her. She was now almost officially a week late and it was hard to focus on working, or reading, or even walking down the street without being consumed by anxiety. The fatalist in her set in. She was being punished; her good fortune had come to an end. Now she would have to scramble, she would lose her job, she would have to ask for help. But where? She didn’t know, but she resigned herself so completely that when, on Sunday evening, in the middle of swiftly undressing, she found herself bleeding, there was such shock, and such unexpected grief mixed with relief, that she burst into tears. She sank onto the bed and gave into big, shuddering sobs even as she felt herself brighten and become buoyant with the knowledge that there was no baby.

  It had now been more than a month since she had seen Jacob, since he had said, “Are you kidding? I’d love it if you were in New York.” Where was he?

  The newsreel that the visiting crew had filmed on Independence Day in Cascade played in theaters the week of July 29, and America sighed. Because what small town did not have a Criterion Theater? A Brilliant Lunch Bar? A tiny cemetery with rain-worn tombstones toppling over behind a steepled church? And who could conceive of the destruction of such permanence?

  Still she heard nothing from Jacob. On Friday night, her apartment was so stuffy and hot she couldn’t sleep but lay half-awake all night, slick with sweat. The apartment was an oven on Saturday, too stifling to do anything. Maria Petrova knocked on her door and invited her down for Russian blintsi, thin pancakes that Dez devoured, her first home-cooked meal in weeks.

  She spent the rest of the day alone but not alone, sketching children at a picnic in Central Park. She made the kind of witty small talk, with people she would never see again, that is exhilarating at the time, dispiriting when recollected. That evening, her first installment of Postcards from America came out. She picked up the magazine at the corner drugstore and sat with it at the fountain. She ordered a vanilla Coke and studied her painting. As text, the editors had decided on a collection of real quotes from people who had lived in Macomber:

  “After the droughts, the dusters came and you couldn’t breathe lest you held a rag to your face.”

  “Every single crop was smothered by dirt.”

  “We might have survived the drought years if the banks and land companies hadn’t bought up all the land and cleared the timber. The cleared land left us wide open to the windstorms and then they foreclosed on us.”

  People reacted to it, and the next week the Standard’s offices received three sacks of postcards, so many that Mr. Washburn had to hire a girl from Barnard to sort through them all. The workweek was busy with the new project—a fire that leveled a town in California—and editorial meetings to decide which ideas to illustrate and in which order, but the weekend itself was long, and by late Sunday afternoon, she was restless. In fits and starts, she’d spent all of Saturday attempting a new painting that wasn’t amounting to anything. Now she scraped down the canvas, leaving just smeared, ruddy nothingness.

  She abandoned her easel for a walk. In Central Park, fat leaves hung flat and limp from their branches. She wanted to reach into the thick, sultry air and grab handfuls of it, paint it, use it. She wanted to share her feelings. She wanted to talk. She was alone in the middle of New York. She needed to make some friends. She should probably get over her resentment and get in touch with Abby.

  Back in her flat, she picked up Portia’s box. She held it a long while, even getting out the key. Something infinitely worth saving, her father had said. She played with fitting the key into the lock until, exasperated with herself, she pushed both items back onto the shelf and leaned out the middle window. It was a perfect, hazy summer evening, heavy with an enveloping humidity that mellowed the sounds of horns and streetcars and radios. A woman pushed a giant pram down the street; a small white terrier skipped and pulled from its leash; a man strode purposefully, newspaper tucked under his arm.

  She wanted so badly to look down and see Jacob, had imagined it so often, that she became oddly still when she did see him, her heart seeming to stop, not believing that the person really was him, slowly walking down the street, checking the numbers on the buildings.

  He glanced up. Their eyes met, and she was filled with relief and elation, even as she marked that he did not smile, wave, or shout. It didn’t matter. He could be subdued for any number of reasons. All she cared about was that he was here, finally, and she flew down the four flights of stairs to let him in.

  Through the thick glass sidelight, she could see him on the landing, holding his hat, fingering the brim. He looked worried, guarded. She opened the door.

  “Jacob,” she said uncertainly. “Finally.”

  He met her eyes with a look that was apologetic and regretful. “I know I should have come sooner,” he said, “but I really didn’t know how to.”

  She pushed down the anxiety that bubbled up inside her, and led him upstairs, trying to speak vivaciously, pointing out the doors that led to her colorful neighbors. They met Maria Petrova, on the second-floor landing, who said, “Is this the young man you wait for?” Dez was embarrassed to be found out, embarrassed and relieved. Let him know, she thought. Let him know I’ve been waiting for him. They could handle whatever was wrong. All that mattered was that he was here, finally.

  But his noncommittal, forced smile increased her nervousness. By the time they reached her apartment, she was literally queasy and had to sit down. Jacob took in the room, noting the scraped canvas on the easel, the view out the windows. His gaze fell on the bed and darted away.

  “Please. Sit.” She gestured to the ladder-back chair and offered a cold drink—or tea? “I don’t have coffee, but—”

  “Nothing. Thanks.”

  She folded her hands in her lap. “It was so awful—in Cascade.” She was close to stammering. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that. It was all my fault. Do you remember I was about to tell you something when Dwight and Wendell and that man Lowell came in?”

  He put up a hand to stop her. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t explain.”

  “But I need to.”

  “It’s done. And maybe it was all a good thing.”

  Her eyes asked, why? How could what happened be a good thing?

  “You find out what people are made of. You find out what you yourself are made of.” She didn’t like the way he spoke without looking at her. She tried to catch his eye but he looked at his hands, at the floor, everywhere but at her. “I thought I could stand the obstacles we would have to face together, if we ever were together,” he said. “But when something like this happens, you realize who you are and where you come from and nothing’s ever going to change that, and you think about children and raising them, and do you give in to your own selfish impulses?”

  What was he talking about? They were both in New York. She was free. He was free.

  “At first, I hoped you would call, write to me, something,” he said.

  “But I did call,” she said eagerly. “Your mother hung up on me.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if something had been made clear. “Well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter anyway,” he said. “Because what’s the point, really, of all of this?”

  “Of what?”

  He gestured to her easel, to the city beyond the window, the approaching storm. “All of it.” The room grew darker, she could no longer clearly see his face. “You can smell the rain.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, on my way here I stopped in to that cathedral on Fifth Avenue. I’d never been inside a Christian church before. Have you been in it?” When she shook her head no, he described the marble floor, the vaulted ceiling, the banks of candles flickering inside red glass votives. “Every footstep echoes in a place like that. I suppose that’s the intent.”

  She listened, waiting for his point.

  “Isn’t it strange, Dez, that we never see certain parts of ourse
lves? Our backs, our lungs, our hearts. We never know what it really is to sit across from ourselves.”

  “No,” she said. “But—?”

  “And does it matter? And does religion really matter all that much? It doesn’t matter to my tubes of paint, to the canvases I manage to produce. It only matters in places like churches and temples, in homes like my mother’s. That man on the cross was a Jew, and if people hadn’t believed in the idea of him being a messiah, the start of something new, you and I might not have seemed so different.”

  “We’re not,” she said, shaking her head, confused. “Why are you saying all this?”

  “Because it’s already done.”

  “What’s done?” Look at me, she thought. Take my hand. Anything.

  “Ruth is pregnant,” he said. And he didn’t repeat himself, but the words echoed in her head; they rolled around in it for days.

  She shut her eyes, shut them as if shutting them tight would squeeze away what he’d said. Everything receded—noise, boundaries, the sound of his voice as she counted backward in her head. If Ruth was pregnant now, then he was having much more of a relationship with her than he had ever let on. She felt suddenly nauseated, and heard his voice as if it were somewhere far outside herself.

  “After what happened in Cascade, I went back to Springfield and there was Ruth. A comfort.” Planned words. Words that were like so many lines in a play. “Perhaps refuge. A mistake.”

  A mistake. She would cling to that. He returned to Ruth and Ruth was a mistake. “So what are you going to do?”

  He looked at her wordlessly.

  “You’re going to marry her,” she said. And when he didn’t reply, the obvious took so much of her voice away that she could only whisper, “You already have.” She barely heard the rest of what he said, that he and Ruth shared the same background, after all, that children were best raised that way, it seemed. Her throat closed up, so painfully tight it was impossible to breathe. What kind of grief was this? It was not what she felt when her father died. It was something new, something worse, because it was poisoned with a jealousy that made her hands clench, her nails dig into her palms, ready to turn her into the animal scratching at her insides.