Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  The new Carlyle Hotel was quiet and genteel but thoroughly modern, designed and decorated in the arts décoratif style that had defined Paris and the modern world in the mid-1920s. It was graceful and restrained in a way Dez found soothing. Why, she hadn’t been in a nice hotel in years. They pushed through a door to a dark, intimate bar full of small, sleek tables, and a pianist playing tranquilizing music. Maxie turned out to be easy company—someone who chattered nonstop, the kind of person who really just liked to have an audience. She ordered two old-fashioneds. “They invented these over at the Waldorf. They’re all the rage.”

  The drinks arrived on a silver tray and looked appealing, with a rich amber hue and fat cherry garnish. Dez, expecting it to taste sweet, sputtered when the first sip was surprisingly harsh.

  Maxie laughed. “That’s bourbon for you,” she said, turning to a man who had paused by their table.

  “What’s next, Maxie?”

  “Nothing till the end of March,” she said, waving him away with a laugh. “You think I’d spend a winter here? No thank you.” She fished the cherry from her drink and popped it between her lips.

  “You have a show planned for March?” Dez asked.

  “Uh-huh. Ciggy?”

  Dez took a cigarette from the pack, and before they could light them, the waiter reappeared to flick a silver lighter. Maxie lit up. She would be in Miami in two weeks, she said. “Have you been there? No? This style”—she waved a hand—“is everywhere. Toots’s place looks like an ocean liner.” She might do a place of her own down there, she said, and talked about glass brick walls and Bakelite doors. Dez only half-heard. Here she was, having a drink with Maxie Eisenberg. Shouldn’t she try to get Maxie to look at her work? She already knew that Maxie was contemptuous of timidity, so waited for the right pause in the conversation then said, as confidently as she could, “If you’re having a new show, you need to see my Shakespeare series. After this, we could walk across the park and have a look at them.”

  Maxie narrowed her eyes and pursed her mouth, tugging on her lower lip while she considered. “Let’s have another drink. Then I suppose we can cab over.”

  “Great,” Dez said coolly. The next hour, she was almost afraid to breathe, afraid that mercurial Maxie would turn petulant and change her mind. And what if they got to her apartment and Maxie made some kind of pass? She swallowed hard. She would just have to take the risk and deal with that if it happened, behave the way she would behave toward any man who did that—be nice and express some thanks.

  When they finished their cocktails, Dez insisted on paying the bill, to level the playing field. Outside, the night air had grown chilly. The doorman lifted a gloved hand and a cab glided forward.

  At Dez’s, Maxie complained about the lack of an elevator. On the third landing, she laid her hand on the banister and paused to breathe heavily. “For Christ’s sake.”

  Dez never had visitors. She lived too far uptown and, frankly, liked keeping her small space private. “Just one more flight,” she coaxed, relieved when they reached the fourth floor and she could fit her key into the lock.

  As soon as Maxie entered the apartment, she turned all business, walking straight up to The Black Veil, folding her arms and inspecting it. “Oh, my dear,” she said. One red fingernail tapped at her front teeth. “Oh, my dear.”

  Dez waited, watching Maxie’s unsmiling face. A full minute passed.

  “You weren’t kidding me, were you? Well, you’ve got yourself a sale. I’ll take this.”

  “Oh, no. I—” She hadn’t expected Maxie to make such a fast decision. “I can’t sell that one. I meant for you to see—”

  “Excuse me?”

  It was Jacob’s painting. If Dez lost control of it, he would likely never see it. “That one’s private. It’s not anything I want to part with.”

  “You drag me up here and then tell you don’t want to ‘part with’ it?” Maxie mimicked her. “They’re not your babies. They’re your full-grown adults and what you do is send them out into the world. Now do you want my help or don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, but you’ve come to see the Shakespeare canvases.” Dez quite firmly led Maxie to the large closet where the Shakespeare canvases leaned, one behind the other, against the wall.

  Maxie looked a long time, silently, at the first one, the interlocking Macbeth. Then she lifted it away and set it against the wall to examine the next one, The Tempest. Then Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Hamlet. She studied them all quietly, finally breaking her silence to speak almost languidly. “I just love that you’ve got a series.” She fingered Othello—up close, a smearing of shapes and color, but from a distance: the distinct impression of towering black rage, of violated, martyred white, of crimson.

  “D. H. Spaulding,” she said, as if to herself. “D. H. Spaulding.” She turned to face Dez decisively. “Do you want to start a stir?”

  “What kind of stir?”

  “How much do you care about fame, about instant fame?”

  Dez had had a small taste of instant fame with the postcards. It was cheap, and it wasn’t enduring, she knew that. Still, she had enjoyed the recognition.

  “Because I’m thinking that these paintings could cause a stir. But it might be better if they came out of the blue, if no one really knew much about the artist, and also—” She paused. “If the artist was assumed to be male. There’s something very masculine about these, such an internal, emotionally raw look to them.”

  Seeing Dez’s reaction, Maxie softened. “It’s just the way it is, hon.”

  “That doesn’t make me resent it any less.”

  “Well, I like that you’ve signed them D. H. Spaulding.”

  “Spaulding is my legal name.”

  “Is it? Well, I like it, the initials. Very neutral. Everyone you’ve met at the League, everyone in town, knows you as Hart, right? Has anyone seen these? No? We could show them and leave them all wondering who the hell painted them.”

  Dez hesitated. The honest response was that yes, she wanted to see her paintings shown in Maxie’s gallery, but she wanted to be at the party, wanted to engage in discourse about the paintings, as herself, the acknowledged artist. And yes, she wanted to bask in any glory they might bring.

  But something, maybe misguided pride, made her go with the noble answer—that art lasted, not the artist. “If you think your idea is a good one,” she said, “I suppose we could give it a try.”

  Maxie unveiled the Shakespeare series in the March show she called New New York News. Nobody bought any of the canvases on opening night, but they started a buzz, as did the fact that the artist didn’t show up for the opening. D. H. Spaulding, whoever he was, preferred to let art speak for itself, so Maxie and the program notes, which carefully avoided the use of pronouns, said. Who was he, people wanted to know? Where did he study? “Let art speak for itself?” Was he some kind of hermit or simply pretentious?

  Dez attended the opening with Abby and Amy Cantor, a new friend from the League, and it was hard to stay quiet. At first, she thought she wouldn’t have to. Although the six paintings, all different, showed her reluctance to stick to a particular style, there was a common look to them, almost ineffable, but there—an explosion of color, an underlying darkness—and surely the people she studied with would recognize this. No one did, even though a couple of them, like Abby and Amy, knew that her husband’s name was Spaulding, that she used her maiden name, Hart, in New York. She expected that people would put one and one and one together.

  Standing in front of the six paintings, hanging side by side on one long wall in Maxie’s gallery, Dez tested: she asked Abby outright, “What do you think of these?”

  Abby shrugged. “I hate whoever the hell he is,” she said with a jealous, laughing-at-herself hoot, fumbling for a cigarette. “Where do you want to go after?”

  Dez nudged the conversation back to the paintings. Abby really didn’t know her work, but she knew it better than anyone, and if she didn
’t guess, she didn’t suppose anyone would. “Look, it’s strange. He’s got my name—well, my old name.”

  “He does?” Abby inspected the paintings more closely. “Extremely strange. Who is he?”

  “Maxie won’t say.”

  Abby smirked. “Next you’ll tell me they’re really yours.” She paused to eye the paintings more carefully. “Wait a minute.” She laughed uncomfortably, as if she might be the butt of a joke. “These aren’t really yours, are they?”

  Dez pointed out that D. H. Spaulding had wielded his brush with an intensity and freedom that Boston-trained Desdemona Hart had never come close to possessing.

  A tall, languid-looking man turned to Abby, hat in his hands. “I’ve only ever seen Hamlet and I’m not a painter, but how did he get that messy search for identity down the way he did? It’s marvelous.”

  Dez wanted to kiss him. His was the kind of reaction that made the struggle worthwhile. Though now she faced another struggle: the struggle not to reveal herself.

  “And get it down,” the man continued, “in a way that makes me wonder who the heck I am?”

  Abby edged up to him. “And who might that be?”

  There was an instant connection between Abby and the man, which Dez recognized. It made her wistful. She left them alone and slipped away to be by herself, standing by a window that someone had opened to clear the room of cigarette smoke. The March night air was cold and fresh on her face, the street outside busy with cars and cabs and pedestrians hurrying by. She craned her neck to see the sky. Somewhere up there were the same stars that shone down over what was left of Cascade. Cascade, where people lived who’d never been to Boston, who’d been to Worcester only once or twice in their lives. She tried to comprehend that she had really lived there, that she could still be there, wringing laundry and pounding chicken breasts, looking up at the night sky with a longing to leave. If all the change hadn’t enabled her to go, would she really ever have left? Would she?

  She turned away and, with her back to the window, sipped her wine and watched the people crowding the gallery. They paused in front of her paintings, and in front of Sidney Orenthal’s, James Prout’s, Max Braden’s.

  It was wonderful. It was what she had always wanted.

  After a new critic, Clem Greenberg, wrote that the Shakespeare series showed perhaps the freshest use of interpretive color he had seen in three seasons, and John Russell proclaimed them “paintings of the soul” in The New York Times, an anonymous collector bought the sprightly, vivid Midsummer Night’s Dream, and James Lawrence King himself bought the roiling, whipped-cream Tempest. James Lawrence King, it turned out, was an avid collector of art and well-known to Maxie. How fitting, Dez thought. And what a delicious coincidence. Or was it fate? James Lawrence King didn’t know that he had bought William Hart’s daughter’s painting. He didn’t know that William Hart had suggested the playhouse reopen with The Tempest.

  Maxie sold each canvas for five hundred dollars and paid Dez half. She would sell the rest eventually, she said, and did: Othello in May, Lear and Macbeth two weeks later, and the dark Hamlet to a buyer in July.

  It was an odd feeling to enjoy such substantial success and not be able to lay claim to it, but Maxie’s plan worked. Without knowing anything about the artist, focus turned to the art. A flurry of excitement stirred around D. H. Spaulding as Dez continued to work at the Standard, continued to paint at the League, and continued to grow her savings account. With each sale, with each deposit, she relaxed a bit more. Though she was more nervous about putting her earnings into a bank than she had been in Cascade, the government had been federally insuring deposits since 1933 and she figured a hopefully solid government had to be safer than a strongbox under a bed in a New York City flat.

  It always surprised Dez that people did not see the obvious, did not realize that Dez Hart’s work was D.H.’s. Although she tended to use her League classes for practice and experimentation and paint her “real work” in her own apartment, the truth was that the work was not completely different. The assumption that D.H. was a man made people blind to what was right in front of them.

  Between her job, her classes at the League, her painting at home, and her budding social life, calendar pages started to flip more quickly: November, December, January. Occasionally, she would join people for drinks after class; she even dated someone a few times, a pleasant enough editor for the New York Herald Tribune. But mainly she went home; she worked.

  There was news from Massachusetts: in April, Asa moved to Belchertown, to 14 Elm Street, and Attorney Peterson sent a bulging packet containing the wording of the preliminary divorce agreement. Mr. Washburn sent Joe and Nancy back to Cascade to report on the June Farewell Ball. Dez pored over Joe’s pictures. Cascade had become a bulldozed swath of bowl-shaped acres, ringed by shrubby watershed. The few remaining buildings—the hotel, Town Hall, the train station—stood exposed and naked amid the dirt. They looked like early photographs she had seen of New York in the 1870s. There was that same raw, new look to the landscape. The water authority’s administration offices were housed in the golf course’s fancy clubhouse, which, being located on watershed land, would be the only building allowed to stay intact.

  In July, the playhouse moved to its new plot of land in Lenox. She wasn’t there for the move, but James Lawrence King sent a picture, via his secretary, to assure her it survived the trip. She tucked the picture into a corner of her easel. In it, the playhouse was grainy and forlorn, transplanted onto the grassy stretch of Lenox land. The picture was cropped; she could not see the tall pines that had looked so majestic in earlier photographs. Still, the playhouse was safe and that was what mattered.

  That photograph witnessed many late nights and early mornings of effort. In later years, the mid- to late thirties would be seen as D. H. Spaulding’s most productive period. Maxie never wanted any of Dez’s work from the League, but frequently, she took the canvases D.H. painted alone, at home. Dez knew it wasn’t just the fact of D. H. Spaulding that kept Maxie from buying her League studies. She knew she painted differently when she was alone, with more color and more risk.

  D. H. Spaulding acquired a certain mystique. It was rumored that he lived on a bee farm on Long Island, that he lived on a houseboat on the Seine, moored near Nôtre Dame, that he was really England’s Paul Sandler, producing under a type of painterly pen name. Maxie, with her closed-mouth allusions, fed the speculation, and instructed Dez to conceal her home pieces from everyone else, but it all made Dez nervous. Increasingly, she began to want to lay claim to her efforts, but the kind of buildup she was getting was bound to disappoint people if her real identity was revealed. It wouldn’t matter whether she was unveiled as Leonardo reincarnated or as some gifted love child of Pablo Picasso’s, the mere fact of mystery uncovered always brought with it a sense of disappointment, of deflation. The fact that she was a woman would make the disillusionment total.

  But the mystique grew, and every month or so, to the point where it became a running joke, Maxie asked for The Black Veil. She could sell it in a minute; Dez would be set for a good long time. But Dez always said no, and it sat in her apartment, hidden in the closet with her other work, for three years—three years during which she never once ran into Jacob.

  For a long time she expected that she would inevitably encounter him. She knew, through Amy Cantor, that he did indeed become a member of the Easel Project. She also knew that, as a member of that project, he could paint wherever he liked and that most artists chose to work at home or in their own studios. Still, she expected she would run into him sometime. New York was a big city, but it wasn’t that big. She braced for the possibility that she might even see him when he was with his wife and baby, but months passed, then a year, two years, and when she did not ever glimpse him, she grew first bitter, then sad, and then, finally, resigned. In that resigned state, she could think of him with distance, with bemusement even, until some small, beautiful thing, a reflection on a rainy pavement, or the s
ound of jazz from one of the clubs on Columbus, would pierce her, and remind her of what she still missed.

  38

  She hoped Jacob would see it. When The Black Veil was so misunderstood, and when, ironically, that misunderstanding brought her such acclaim, such incredible, instant fame, the primary reason she was elated by the publicity was that she wanted Jacob to know that with that painting she was telling the truth and that she had told it for him.

  She finally decided to show it in the fall of 1939. The previous June, her divorce was made final at last. She returned to Massachusetts to meet with Asa in a Springfield court, to sign the documents that would dissolve their marriage. Asa, embarrassed to be standing in front of a judge in a divorce case, was cordial to Dez, but only that. Four years had passed since the day she boarded the train at Cascade Station; he’d had a lot of time to reflect. His eyes had faint lines around the corners; he wore a buttoned-up cardigan sweater under his suit. He seemed to have become a contented bachelor, and as they stood side by side in front of the judge, she doubted that he would marry again.

  Afterward, she traveled to Cascade by herself. The Standard continued the project with quarterly progress reports, but used Joe Katz’s stark photographs and his wife, Nancy’s reporting exclusively. There had been no need for Dez’s interpretive paintings since The Farewell Ball in the summer of 1936.

  Dez was eager to see the area now that the reservoir was complete. Enough time had passed that all the slow, transitional destruction/construction was done. The reservoir had even been dedicated, and formally named the Rappahannock, an Indian word for “swift rising river.”

  She traveled from Springfield to Bath and registered at the Bath River Hotel, where she hired a driver to take her out to the Rappahannock. The driver was a quiet old man who kept his cap pulled down over his forehead and hummed, but otherwise didn’t say a word. He drove Dez the ten miles on leafy, tree-lined Route 13 to the reservoir, slowing down when they got to fenced-off land with signs, at intervals, that read Massachusetts Water Authority. At one point, Dez guessed that they were in the area of what had been the Poplar Street turnoff, but as soon as they passed through a set of iron gates, she lost her bearings. They were on a paved road through what might have been a grassy meadow, or maybe the grassy meadow had developed after the houses and trees came down. The road led straight to a small circular rotary that offered a choice: left or right. Ahead lay the great basin, a large expanse of what looked, now, like a half-filled lake. “Stop,” she said. “Please. I want to get out.”