Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  “Dez,” he said. “It was the right thing to do and you were married anyway, and it’s all been a mess, hasn’t it? And I’m thirty-two, I suppose it’s high time I became a father and—Ruth is Jewish. We’ll raise the child the way we know how.”

  Her eyes filled; she couldn’t control them.

  “I have to think it was meant to be, that it’s for the best.” But his eyes were like a cartoonist had drawn them: two dazed spirals spinning into infinity.

  “You talked yourself into it,” she said as if she could talk away the facts, turn back time. As if by proving that he had, he could somehow undo what he had done. “What is she like? I don’t even know.” Needing a picture of Ruth in her mind even as she tried to blot her out. Wanting Ruth, on some level, to be a pale version of Dez, someone he had dated only because he couldn’t have the real thing.

  “Ruth,” he said, the speaking of her name an abrupt expulsion of breath, “is—a regular girl. She was a typist at Waterman’s until the plant closed.”

  “A typist.”

  The wind was blowing a heavy branch to and fro, making it scrape the far window. He fixed his gaze on it. “Don’t, Dez.”

  She couldn’t help it. She had to punish herself, had to make the pain as bad as it could be so that she would know where its end was. “When is the baby coming? Where are you living?”

  “Winter,” he said bleakly. “We’re down on East Third Street. A cold-water walk-up.”

  So they were living in poverty. “What about your inheritance?” She said the word too bitterly and his face drained of color, and she was sorry. Sick and sorry. She said that she was sorry. “I don’t want to be cruel.” Though a part of her did, a part of her was burning with bitterness toward Ruth. Ruth! Who was Ruth to take him away? And who was Jacob to let himself be taken? Did he never feel what she thought he felt? Or did what he feel not really matter to him? What mattered to a man?

  “It could be years before I see any of that, if I do,” he said. “Other beneficiaries, like Dorothy King, have formally protested the will. I don’t even care, to tell you the truth.”

  “What about the W.P.A.? Did you get in?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ll be put on the Easel Project. Thankfully.” The Easel Project was reserved for real talent. Would she, if she was needy enough, be put on the Easel Project? Or was it really just for men?

  “Though it won’t be as much of a salary as we all hoped,” he said. “Twenty-three dollars and eighty-six cents a week.”

  She challenged him, voice ragged. “What if I had been pregnant? What would you have done?”

  His eyes closed. “I didn’t even want to think that might happen.”

  “It could have. It might have. What would you have done?”

  “Dez—” He got to his feet. “I have to go. I shouldn’t be here. I just couldn’t leave you wondering after I saw your message.” He flushed. “In the postcard, I mean. The Rossetti? At least I thought you—”

  “No, you’re right.” He’d seen, he’d understood. There was some happiness to know that. But it didn’t matter, did it, because he was married to Ruth Sondheim—to Ruth Solomon. Ruth Solomon was pregnant.

  He was actually putting on his hat, ready to close the door on her, to walk out, to leave. “So that’s it?” She rose to her feet. “We no longer have a friendship, nothing, because suddenly you’re married, when all along I was married, still am married?”

  A pulse beat along his jaw. He didn’t meet her eyes. But he also didn’t move to leave. Twilight, Cascade Common, the painting she had painted with him, hung beside the door. She ran her fingertips over the thick layers of paint, feeling where she, where he, had laid down brushstrokes. She wanted to touch him, and knowing she couldn’t was the worst kind of rejection. Here they were, two people alone in a room, forbidding themselves. “How can we live in the same city and not see each other, Jacob?”

  He rested his hand on the doorknob. “Sometimes things are as they must be,” he said, “not as they ought to be.”

  Nonsense! she wanted to cry. Don’t be so bloody high-minded. “Just tell me. Tell me what you would have done if I’d told you I was pregnant?”

  “Oh, Dez—” An ambulance wailed through the open window. He waited until the sound grew faint. “I measure things,” he said finally, turning the doorknob, opening the door. “I weigh things. You’re still married. Your child would have a name, a father. Ruth’s would not.” He looked like he had just figured that out, and that the logic of his conclusion made him feel better, more resolved. “I’m so sorry, but life is full of tough choices between less-than-perfect alternatives.”

  And then he was gone. She stood on the threshold, listening to his steps swiftly descending the stairs. She ran to the window and watched him emerge from the entrance and head east toward Broadway. The rain had started, hitting the pavement in fat wet drops; he hunched forward into it and never looked back, never looked up.

  Ten minutes later, Maria Petrova knocked on her door, expecting to hear the excited babble of a young woman in love, and found her blubbering instead. Dez told her everything, every detail, expecting that Maria would recoil, but Maria was an old woman and had seen more in life than Dez’s sorry tale. “Cry and get it out,” she said. “Then get over it, because it wasn’t meant to be.”

  Dez had spent weeks believing that fate had steered her toward New York and Jacob. She didn’t want to hear that Jacob wasn’t meant to be. She spent a ferocious week at the Standard, immersing herself in work. She had been given a week to produce each postcard, a preposterously generous amount of time considering how fast she’d worked in Cascade. In just two days, she produced her most tumultuous card to date: the twisted wrought iron, soaking rain, and spiraling wind of the tornado that spun through New Orleans in March 1934, flattening everything in its way.

  32

  Oddly enough, it was Abby who reminded Dez why she was in New York, who propelled her into the frame of mind she needed to be in to paint The Black Veil.

  On Friday Dez was at work, at her drawing board, when she heard Abby’s unmistakable husky chirp coming from Mr. Washburn’s office around the corner. Through the din of the typewriters and voices around her, Dez’s ears pricked up, hand and pen mindlessly working the paper until a shadow fell across her desk. Abby stood there, regarding her pertly. Her lips were bright red, her hair full and curly.

  “Weren’t you going to let me know you were in town?”

  There was something hurt in her face, and Dez felt bad, seeing that, until Abby said, “You know, Dez, I didn’t think you had it in you. I am shocked and amazed that you’re here.”

  “That’s quite a comment coming from someone who used to pant after me like a puppy.”

  Abby laughed. “But I was a pup then.” She perched herself on the edge of Dez’s desk, filling the air with the smell of her spicy perfume, her leathery handbag, her cigarettes. “Where’s your Jewish painter? Did you run away with him?”

  Dez’s silence made Abby smirk. Then she looked at Dez more closely. “Tell me you slept with him, at least.”

  “Shh.” Dez glanced around to make sure no one had heard. “Don’t you realize what you did? You tried to take my job.”

  “Don’t you get it yet? It’s every man for himself.”

  “We’re not men.”

  “Oh, don’t play the saint. Look what you’ve done, you’ve gone and told them my idea was yours.”

  Dez glanced around again, grateful for the clack of typewriters. “It was my idea, actually. We just happened to have the same idea at the same time.” As she spoke, she reconsidered. Maybe the pitch for the Standard job had been forgivable, what with Abby alone in New York with no prospects, anxious to earn money. You really couldn’t blame her for assuming Dez would never come to New York.

  “Well, that’s why we’re friends. And anyway, you were the one they wanted. Obviously. But I’ve got other things going now. Though I did just try to pitch Washburn for some work—
no luck.”

  “What happened with the W.P.A.?”

  “Oh, it’s all up in the air. My credentials didn’t exactly bowl them over. The ones they’re choosing as easel painters are people who’ve already exhibited some. But, if I get my letter of approval from Senator Wagner’s office, which I will, I’ll be put on as an assistant to Stuart Davis, which would be the cat’s meow, don’t you think?” She fished around in her purse and pulled out a pack of Camels. “You want to go to lunch?”

  Until that moment, Dez had no idea how good it would be to go to lunch, and with an old friend. Letters from Abby had been her lifeline for so long. What had she been thinking, all these weeks in the city without seeking her out?

  They went to Conrad’s on Forty-eighth, where the tables were jammed, the pitch of talk was at a high level, and Abby wanted to know everything. Why was she in New York? Had she actually left Asa? “How long does a divorce take, anyway? Is it a lot of trouble?”

  Dez was conscious of the tables on either side of them. In Cascade or Boston, conversation would have paused to discreetly listen. But the women at these tables ignored them. She actually had to raise her voice to be heard over the din as she filled Abby in. “Asa hopes I’m going to change my mind, but at least I don’t have to worry about him sabotaging the playhouse. I don’t think. Though how I’ll ever move it I don’t know. I’ve been hounding the water commissioner. He promised to help, but so far, nothing.”

  “And what about your friend? What happened?”

  Dez told her everything. She needed to tell someone.

  “He’s here and you’re here and you’re not going to see each other? It was okay when you were married but not okay now that he is?”

  How cut and dried that sounded, exactly how Dez had felt, but now she found herself wanting to stand up for Jacob, and her confusion made her uncomfortable. She was grateful when the waiter squeezed in, pad in hand. They ordered two herring salads. A Coke for Dez. Coffee for Abby.

  “So,” Dez said, “are you still living over near Penn Station?”

  “Oh, I’m down in the Village now.” Abby raved about the Village—yes, it was romanticized, but it really was full of poets and artists. “And it’s full, too, of the—how can I say it? It’s full of the world. Every kind of immigrant: Italians and Spaniards and Germans and Jews. Oh, you must come down.” She asked where Dez was living and proclaimed it dull. And too far away. “I don’t suppose you’ve any artists living there.”

  “Actually, I do,” Dez said, thinking of Walter’s turned wood and Maria’s hand-stitched gowns. “Have you joined the Art Students League? I’ve been meaning to.”

  “Oh, do. Go on over. It’s all very informal.” Abby laughed. “You just need an ‘acceptable moral character’ and the means to pay your dues.”

  “Which classes are you taking?”

  “None. I’m modeling.”

  Dez stared. “I didn’t think you were serious about that.”

  “Oh, Dez, don’t be a bluenose.” Abby sat back, gratified to see shock on Dez’s face. The women who’d modeled for them in art school had always seemed soft and soiled and not quite real. Women and men had never painted in the same room when a live model was on display. And now here was Abby, proud that she was that display. “Listen, Dez, you have to do what you can. No one’s opening up their arms to you down here, I can tell you that. I’m just one more artist with a little bit of talent, a woman artist at that.”

  She modeled for students at the League, and privately, she said, for Marco Pineda. She said his name as if Dez should be impressed, and when Dez said she wasn’t familiar with Pineda, she said, “Oh, you will be. Marco makes everyone else look stale and tame. He’s delightfully wicked, and when I model for him—” She closed one eye in a slow wink.

  “And you’ve managed to survive all this time on modeling?”

  Abby laughed. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Dez wasn’t thinking anything, but Abby was grinning as if she was dying to be coerced into giving up a secret. “Of course I had it set up. Sort of. He looks after me, and don’t go acting shocked, but he’s married. He’s got a wife and kids in Rutherford, New Jersey. I give him what he wants, and he gives me what I want, and that’s fine with me. He helped me move down to Morton Street.” She lit up a cigarette and tapped it between her fingernails, enjoying Dez’s silent processing of that information.

  So both of them had been party to adultery. Dez wanted to believe that her act was somehow more pure, but adultery was adultery, wasn’t it?

  “You come to New York,” Abby was saying, “and you kind of see if you have what it takes. I realized I won’t be put on the Easel Project. I accept that. I like modeling well enough, and I’m sure I’ll like being an assistant. This fellow of mine, he’s a collector, and he introduced me to Marco—too bad for him, but if he thinks I hang around on weekends hoping he’ll—anyway, there’s this bash down there tonight. In Sidney Orenthal’s studio. You want to come?”

  Dez’s first instinct was to retreat, to say no. But that was shyness. What else did she have to do? This was a chance to meet people, to meet other artists. “What do I wear?”

  Abby paused, emphasizing the pause by raising one eyebrow slowly. “Casual, honey. Pajama pants, whatever you like.”

  33

  Her heart dropped at the sight of the square, white envelope in her mail cubby that she knew would not be from Jacob, miraculously telling her that he had made a mistake, that Ruth was not pregnant, that the marriage never took place. The postmark was Athol, the letter from Ethel Smith. Asa or Dwight must have forwarded it to New York. The letter rambled, pointing out that people like Dez always got away with covering things up. All you had to do was admit you fooled with that dam and that was enough for the bigwigs. Now no one cares a fig about finding out how Stan really died.

  Upstairs, Dez sat right down and penned a restrained reply. Stan died because he caught his foot in a rock dam. Stan liked poetry. He particularly mentioned Longfellow. I suggest you do something that memorializes Stan, something to do with poetry. You’ll find peace that way, Mrs. Smith.

  But she was shaken. Would Ethel Smith be her Marley’s ghost, always reminding her of her sins? The incident added to the nervousness she felt about going to the party. A gathering of fellow artists. She had heard stories of wild Village parties, but hoped, like most stories, that they were exaggerated. Pajama pants, Abby had said. Compared to that kind of thing, her clothes were hopelessly plain, but she wasn’t about to spend money on clothes yet, and she couldn’t imagine that a bunch of artists had much money to spend on them, either. She ended up sticking with the simple pine-green dress she tried on first, and took the Fifth Avenue bus down to Washington Square. Abby had said eight o’clock but she wanted a little time to explore the area beforehand, before dark. Since arriving in the city, she had not ventured farther south than Thirty-fourth Street.

  She stepped off the bus into the bustle and confusion of a part of the city that wasn’t ordered into the easily maneuvered grid of streets uptown. After crossing Sixth Avenue, she made her way over to Bleecker Street, where she paused in front of a newsstand. She could never pass a newsstand without stopping to take in the pulpy patchwork beauty: the wall of magazines nestled under a canvas roof, the intoxicating smell of newsprint. There was pleasure to know that her work was there, available to anyone with a dime in his pocket.

  A horse pulling a milk wagon passed, maybe on its way home after a long day. The clopping hooves, the sharp smell of horse reminded her of Cascade, and mixed with the smells of bread and newsprint, it made her heartsick a moment, and then glad she had left, glad she had the opportunity to feel heartsick rather than bored and trapped. She followed the smell of bread down the street. In the window of an Italian shop, fat cheeses tied with twine hung from the ceiling. A sign read ricotta tutta and crema, and she didn’t know exactly what those words meant but knew they had to mean something delicious. In a bakery window, crusty
round loaves sat piled on top of one another like stacks of nickels. Five cents a loaf, a sign said. Dez was tempted to buy one and eat it on the sidewalk, but she thought she was going to a proper party. She assumed there would be food.

  The party—how to describe it? She would never again in her life feel as intensely lonely as at that first party. She thought that if any of the loose, casual people there had ever overheard Jacob and herself talking, they would have laughed at their seriousness, at the way Jacob so high-mindedly left her.

  She was later arriving than she’d planned, making a wrong turn off Bleecker Street and misreading a street sign in the gathering dusk. Carmine Street, when she found it, was mangy-looking, lined with rickety buildings and overflowing trash cans. She located number 45, four stone steps leading up to a tired-looking door in need of paint. Inside the cramped vestibule, she searched the tenant listing—Abby had said that the party was at Sidney Orenthal’s, but there was no such name, so she climbed a narrow, sour-smelling stairway, following the sound of a faint din until she reached the fifth floor, where a raucous party was obviously going on behind an unnumbered door. She knocked timidly and stepped back. When no one answered, she knocked again, louder, wishing she’d arranged to go with Abby. She shifted her weight, trying to fix a nonchalant, relaxed look on her face. Someone inside laughed uproariously, and she pictured her apartment with sharp longing. She could catch an uptown bus, pick up a magazine, get something to eat at the Automat, and be home, all within an hour.

  The door opened and a grizzled man barreled through, his eyes bleary and unseeing. He grabbed the railing and half-stumbled, half-slid down the stairs before lurching to a stop on the fourth floor. As Dez watched in alarm, afraid he would pitch over the railing, he swayed from side to side, then doubled over and vomited all over his shoes.