Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  Toward the end of September, as she was finishing Hamlet, she arrived home one evening to another brief letter from Asa. People were starting to wonder about them, he wrote. What was he to tell them?

  She knew it was time to go to Cascade, to let him know, once and for all, that she wasn’t coming back, to oversee the packing-up of her belongings. She had already told Mr. Washburn that the details of the second Cascade Progress Report would have to be reported firsthand. And now it looked like she would have to take a good chunk of savings, get herself out to Amherst College to arrange some kind of move for the playhouse—offer to pay over the course of years, if necessary. Surely a crew of men and a flatbed truck could be found and persuaded to do the job.

  She arrived at work in the morning, ready to knock on Mr. Washburn’s door to ask about making the trip, but he was waiting for her, with news. “James Lawrence King has offered to move your playhouse.”

  The world seemed to stop.

  “You know, the philanthropist, my dear?”

  “Of course.” It was impossibly good news.

  “You’d better sit,” Mr. Washburn said, directing her to the chair opposite his desk. “Because it is certainly fainting news.” He filled her in: James Lawrence King planned to build a summer home in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. He had purchased a good deal of land there. The area was home to Jacob’s Pillow, a summer dance company, and as of next summer, 1936, the town would host summer Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. A Shakespearean theater was what Lenox needed next, King thought.

  Mr. Washburn lit his pipe and puffed on it. “You should know that Elliot Lowell worked for this.”

  “Really.” So Lowell had stuck to his word, after all.

  “And I understand that Mr. Spaulding has been informed of the offer and has agreed to it. So Lowell’s invited us—meaning staff as necessary—up to Cascade to meet with Mr. King next week, to record it all, of course. Quite a bit of work has already begun up there, and I think it’s time to get a photographer and writer involved. Seeing as how Lowell’s paying, I thought I would go, too. You’ve made me quite curious about the place.”

  So it was decided. Four of them would train up the following weekend.

  35

  On September 30, they boarded the northbound train from Penn Station. Joe Katz and Nancy Bracewell, photographer and reporter, respectively, traveled with them. The two were engaged to be married. Joe was obviously Jewish, Nancy a Connecticut Yankee. Dez wanted to know their story and left her seat to sit opposite them, to try to engage them in conversation. But they were young lovers thrilled to find themselves together on a paid trip. They answered her questions politely, but evasively. They wanted to be alone.

  Back in her seat, with Mr. Washburn engrossed in his paper, Dez gazed out the window at the Connecticut countryside. Already, with the city behind them, New York didn’t feel quite real. As if reality existed only where she existed. The metal car she sat in was real, Mr. Washburn turning the pages of his New York Times was real. The white fencepost flashing by, the two dappled horses in that field of clover—all real. When she left Cascade in July, Cascade seemed to become a place that existed somewhere in lost time. It was strangely disorienting to be heading back. She wasn’t sure that seeing it in the demolition stage was a good thing. If she never saw the destruction, she might always have been able to imagine that it still existed, pristine and idyllic as it had been during her growing-up years.

  She was calm enough through the gauzy September morning, through lunch in the dining car—sole in lemon butter, parsley potatoes—through the train change in Hartford. But as they crossed into Massachusetts, chugging closer and closer to Cascade, her heart beat faster. How would people treat her, how would Asa react when she told him she was never coming back? And what could she do with all the belongings she had stored in the playhouse? The conductor announced Cascade Station and the train began to slow. Dez peered out the window, bracing herself for shock, but the station looked exactly the same as the day she left—solid brownstone walls, the wooden overhang, the empty bench with Albie Ray loitering beside it.

  Inside, the clock above the ticket window ticked as usual. A few people sat waiting on the slatted wooden benches. The station was so unchanged that it made the view of the common that greeted them when they passed through the front doors utterly startling. Intellectually, Dez had understood that in order to turn the valley into a bowl of water, every structure, every tree would have to be leveled, but intellect had not prepared her imagination.

  The once-lush rectangle of green grass was gone, transformed into a muddy stretch of rubble. Harsh, bright sunlight beat down on bulldozers parked among the stumps of trees that used to provide leaf-and-pine-needled shade. Nancy began scribbling in a notebook, Joe set up his camera. “This is what the French countryside looked like after the war,” Mr. Washburn said, and they were all silent a moment, looking around, conscious of the constant thwack of ax on wood as more trees were chopped down. “Them’s what we’re calling woodpeckers,” Albie said, referring to the ax wielders. “And look, Dez. Your old house is gone.”

  Dez peered ahead. Where the Hart home and three others once stood were four gaping holes. Two more houses had been bulldozed and stood in giant splintered piles that were waiting to be carted away. As Joe photographed the holes, Mr. Washburn, ever considerate, pointed to the far end of the common. “But there’s your playhouse, safe and sound.” It, at least, still stood, and thank God—thank James Lawrence King—the bulldozer would spare it. Elliot Lowell wanted publicity, of course, for his run for the senate, but at least he had delivered on his promise.

  Down to the left, the Round Church was completely gone, its existence marked only by a cavernous cellar hole. “You’d never know it,” Dez said, “but that’s where the beautiful Round Church was.”

  “I remember it from your postcards,” Mr. Washburn said. “Why was it round, anyway?”

  “The Devil can’t hide in a church that hasn’t any corners,” Dez said with a laugh. “Or so the story went. It was built such a long time ago, 1815 or so, no one really knows.”

  She looked around, hands on her hips, taking stock. They had done so much, so quickly! From the common, it was now possible to see past the falls clear to River Road. She could see the house, could even make out the bench where her father sat that last day of his life.

  They picked their way through the mud and rubble toward the hotel. A dynamite blast rumbled through the valley, and feeling the vibrations underfoot, Dez quelled a mixture of uncertainty and regret and nostalgia. Too late, too late for any of that. There was no looking back now.

  At the front desk, Mrs. Mayhew clearly wasn’t sure how to talk to Dez. On the one hand, Dez was the girl who had brought—who was still bringing—celebrity to the town. But it was a small town and she had left her husband, surely that was what had happened. She left in July and hadn’t been back all summer and now she was there with another man, an employer, but another man all the same. And there had been those stories about her and the peddler. Still—Asa went around town acting proper and behaving as if everything was normal. She decided to smile sweetly at Dez, at the whole New York group. She told them they were welcome, that supper would be served between five thirty and seven thirty, and breakfast from seven to nine.

  Dez phoned Asa from the lobby. He was at the drugstore and wanted to come right over but Dez put him off. It had been a long day, and she didn’t have the emotional strength to deal with Asa right now. She told him she was tired, that she was going to retire to her room early. She agreed to meet him at the house in the morning.

  At seven the next day, she slipped out of the hotel, sketchbook in hand, to walk the route that was so familiar yet so changed. Her eye noted the kind of detail that would end up in the Cascade Progress Report: the gaping stone foundation that had supported the Round Church for 120 years, the orderly rows of dark patches of earth showing where coffins had been disinterred, the swath of tr
ee stumps along Main Street. Piles of bricks lay heaped along Elm Street, waiting to be carted away by a salvage company. Abandoned chickens on Pond Street pecked the ground for food.

  It was early, but she still bumped into a few people. Reactions were mixed. Judith Stein hurried by with a frosty look and no hello. Zeke was outwardly as effusive as ever, praising the postcards, asking about New York, but all the while his eyes tried to gauge just what was going on. Bud’s wife was kind, taking Dez’s hand and saying it was good to see her back, her placid face saying, I don’t want to know. I don’t judge. Dez caught sight of Lil coming out of her apartment above Stein’s but Lil darted back inside and pretended not to see her.

  Up River Road, the closed-up summer homes were more forlorn than ever. They would never see life again now. She stood for a moment facing the carriage house behind Richard Harcourt’s old house, remembering for a moment how Jacob had parked his truck there that final day. Then she crossed the street and headed down the driveway.

  It was strange to be able to see across the river clear into the town center. It was also strange to knock like the visitor that she was. She knocked again and pushed on the door, calling out Asa’s name. The hall was cluttered with boxes. She stepped around them, bumping into him as he emerged from the kitchen.

  Their embrace was a clumsy clasping of shoulders and arms, quick and polite. He had cut his hair extrashort on top, which made his face look more angular, more bony. Or maybe it was just that he had blurred for her while she was in New York. “How are you?” she asked.

  He shrugged, his eyes intent on her face, reading her, sensing what was going to happen. “What’d you think?” he asked, referring to the changes in town.

  “It’s so bright with all those trees gone. I can’t believe how quickly they got started. I guess there’s no turning back now.” She glanced at the boxes in the hall.

  “Every night I try to do a little packing up.”

  “I thought you weren’t moving till spring.”

  He closed his eyes, held them shut a beat.

  She hadn’t meant to be so blunt. “I’m sorry, Asa.” She’d meant to wait, to break the news gently. “But I suppose you must know by now.”

  His face darkened, although with disappointment, not anger. “Yes,” he said. “I guess we’d better discuss all that. As for moving, no, not till spring, but I don’t want to feel rushed. You want some coffee?”

  He filled the pot and turned on the gas. He had made the kitchen his own, cups and canisters off the shelves and lined up neatly on the drainboard, at hand, the way he maintained his supplies at the drugstore. Dez peeked across the hall into his study. It, too, was full of boxes, the bookshelves almost completely empty.

  “So tell me, Dez,” he said. “Are you with him down there?”

  She was surprised that he was so blunt, but glad of it. “No, Asa, I’m not. And if you must know, he’s married now.” At least she could give him that. “He had a girlfriend all this time, you know. It was friendship between us.”

  “I see.” He turned to hide his pleasure, making himself busy with the coffee cups. “So, then, you really are there just because you want to be there? Because you want to work like a man?”

  “I guess that’s the long and the short of it.”

  He shook his head. Her desires, her behavior made no sense to him. She looked at the kitchen sink, at the washing machine with the rusty edge. In a way it felt as if she had never really left, that she still worked that old machine, cooked on those gas rings, filled that soapstone sink with suds and dishes. Yet, at the same time, it all felt part of the past. At this point, neither Cascade nor New York seemed real. She herself might not even be real. She pressed her weight against the linoleum, feeling the strength of the floor against her shoes, remembering the early nights of their marriage, when her father was still alive and she was so grateful for Asa’s shelter, for the comfortable bed, for a kitchen to cook him hot meals. After supper, they sometimes played cards, the three of them, one quick round of whist before Asa returned to the drugstore. Those were the days before Jacob came into her life, before she had known to be dissatisfied. She made herself look out at the tree where she and Jacob had kissed, thinking, I am in control of this memory. I am in charge.

  She realized Asa was talking about the house in Belchertown. There was a drugstore there, he was saying. Addison’s. Jim Addison was close to retiring; his son had no interest in the business. “Strictly a soda fountain, like most, though,” he said. “No grill. Old fittings. It’s a step backward, but I could sort something out.” His arms hung by his side and he looked at her with still-lingering bewilderment. There were things in the air, about to be said. Obligatory things. She put a hand to his mouth and suggested that they remember their nice times together as just that—nice.

  “I guess our separation is what you’d call an open secret anyway,” he said. “Everyone knows, and nobody’s said anything, and everyone’s awfully nice about it.”

  “That’s ’cause you handled it so well, Asa. You were right, that first week, to insist on handling it the way you did.”

  He looked down at her naked ring finger. Maybe she should have had the decency to put it back on before making the trip, but the truth was, she’d never given it a thought.

  “Never thought I’d see myself divorced,” he said.

  She tried to show, with all the powers of expression her face was capable of, just how sorry she was. “But thank you so much for taking care of the playhouse, for letting all this happen.”

  He was incredulous. “Did you really think I’d let it be destroyed?”

  She shrugged. She didn’t know. It was hard enough to really know yourself, to know what you were capable of, never mind another person.

  The coffeepot started its faint rumbling. “This pot takes forever,” he said.

  “Forget the coffee. Show me the new cemetery,” she said, to take their minds off what was bad, to turn their minds to what was worse. “Drive me there, will you?”

  The state had tried its best to make the new cemetery glorious, magnificent. The landscaping was composed of hedges and flowering trees and pebble-stoned paths named Azalea and Gardenia that connected clusters of plots to clusters of plots, each cluster presided over by leafy oaks and maples, all designed to beautify the ugly fact that souls resting for years were dug up by gravediggers, that rotting coffins were moved under cover of night to be furtively and hastily reburied by morning.

  Dez fretted that she should have been there when they moved her family, but Asa assured her: the board in charge of doing the moving had insisted that families not be involved. “The digging up and the reburying wasn’t always as neat as they’d hoped,” he said, then apologized. “They didn’t want to upset people.”

  Still. To think that she hadn’t known where her family’s remains were the last few weeks. She stood over their headstones, situated near a maple sapling on Peony Path. William Aloysius Hart, 1864–1934. Caroline Haywood Hart, 1884–1918. Timon William Hart, 1910–1918. Lives defined and reduced by a bracketing of numbers.

  Once someone was dead awhile, it was hard to believe they’d really existed. Dead was dead. Past was past. Yet the processing of the centuries would go on. Desdemona Hart Spaulding, 1908–

  Timon’s eight years looked negligible on stone. They were slim digits that in no way conveyed that his eight years had seemed longer because they had also seemed endless. Timon’s skin had been darker than his sister’s, his hair white-blond with a cowlick that refused to flatten, even with pomade. He’d been a king at marbles and could run like the devil. He’d had a talent for the piano, too, just like their mother, but hadn’t liked her Brahms and Beethoven and instead insisted on making up his own, short, funny tunes with lyrics to match. A whole little life that had just—stopped.

  “I don’t know that I want to be buried here,” Asa said. “I always assumed I’d be buried in Cascade, but I don’t think I want to be buried here.”

&
nbsp; Dez had never, before this day, given a thought to where she might be buried. She almost asked, did it matter? But it did matter—to Asa, to his type of person.

  “Addison’s will be good for you,” she said. “You’re still young. By the time you’re ready to retire, Belchertown will be home to you. You can be buried there.”

  He seemed to take comfort in the idea.

  On Elm Street, Asa whistled. “Will you look at that?” Parked in front of the playhouse sat a silver-blue Rolls-Royce. “That’s a Phantom,” he said. They caught up with Joe and Nancy, walking over from the hotel. “Asa Spaulding, legal owner of the playhouse,” Dez said, making introductions. “Joe Katz, Nancy Bracewell.” She felt a bit guilty, not identifying him as her husband, but she didn’t want to reveal any more of her private life to people than was necessary.

  Inside, they met up with Elliot Lowell, who introduced them to James Lawrence King, Frank May, King’s attorney, the engineer Mark Whitman, and Dick Holt, the man who would supervise the move. James Lawrence King was not the imposing sort Dez expected but a tall, wiry man with a face set in a perpetual squint. He had a cordial yet distracted way of talking and got right down to business, his quiet authority evident when Lowell tried to orchestrate a photograph. He stopped him with a gesture. “No pictures yet.”

  He wasn’t the type to do more than oversee a project, but he wanted to check that the building was sound before signing the deal and arranging for its move to Lenox. They toured the building for more than an hour, with King directing most of his questions to Dez. Were there ever any major maintenance problems? No. How extensive was the prop collection? Complete, as far as she knew, for all of the major plays. King’s interest was focused firmly on the theater, not at all on her, but for the first time since Jacob, she felt that fluttering of mild panic, that giddy rumbling of attraction. It didn’t make sense. He had a mouth like a gash; he had to be at least fifty.