Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  The basin was vast, a bowl thirty-six square miles in size, ringed by watershed land. The surrounding land still looked scarred, disturbed, unnatural. The reservoir was about a quarter way full, slowly rising as the river, rainwater, and melting winter snow filled it year after year. Dez had read that it would take eight or nine years to fill the Rappahannock to capacity.

  She peered down the road on either side of the rotary, looking for landmarks, but there were none. Back in the car, she instructed the driver to take a left, a blind choice. About a quarter mile down the road, they came to a parking lot and building—the former golf-course clubhouse. The ornate stone structure now bore a plaque identifying it as the water authority’s administration office. That meant that the common, the falls, River Road, and all of it must have been down past the rotary in the other direction. They headed back and this time the road began to climb a curving hill. At the summit, a semicircular parking area allowed cars to stop and look out over the reservoir. A wooden sign read Cascade Lookout. Cascade Lookout, it seemed, was the ridge that once sat high above Pine Point, and it offered a spectacular view. Where once the river below flowed in from the northeast and curved around in a swooping arc toward town, now the water spread out like a vast lake.

  Hard to fathom that it was the same space. The same spot of earth.

  The car door opened and the driver got out to join her in looking out over the basin. “I’m guessing you used to live here.”

  “I did. We lived on the common, then I moved a little bit out, just right about there, when I got married.” She pointed down to the left, to where the house on River Road must have stood. Asa’s mother’s Catholic kneelers, she suddenly remembered. What had become of them? Probably packed and moved to Belchertown.

  “I bring a lot of people out here. Those postcards they did made this place kind of famous. People always want to come out and have a look.”

  They drove back down the hill and stopped where Dez thought the Cascade Falls used to roar and spray. Sure enough, off to the left, a road led in toward the reservoir, toward what must have been the town center, the paved roads still in place. She got out and followed the road. Strange to think it was the same pavement she had walked so many times, yet when she looked left or right or straight ahead, nothing—nothing—was familiar. Not a single shrub or stone. She followed the road until it ended at the water, and she could only faintly see the drowned asphalt. The town center had sat at a low elevation, so they hadn’t had to do any digging here. And because the water levels were still low, the basin was shallow, the submerged network of paved roads still visible. Everything else had been painstakingly removed—every building, streetlamp, mailbox, fence.

  Near the edge of the basin, she realized she was walking parallel to what must have been Elm Street, which had led to Chestnut Street, to the hotel and to the playhouse. Where buildings were razed, large cellar holes quickly filled with water. In the distance, something black, like a stick or pole, seemed to float upright under the water. At first, she couldn’t make it out. Then she realized it was the old iron hitching post, still standing in front of the cellar hole where the Cascade Hotel had stood. Why had they left that? Surely not a mistake. The decision of someone who couldn’t stand to totally obliterate what had once been a civilization? She could imagine so, because it was dizzying to remember the hotel in that very spot, to visualize herself as a ten-year-old, a twenty-year-old, walking in a place that had seemed so permanent and had proven to be anything but. Beside it, too far away to really see, would be the playhouse’s flooded cellar hole. She stared in the direction of the hole, trying to imagine, to re-create the past, to do some kind of justice to it, to believe that the past could somehow be kept alive.

  She supposed it could—through art. The past lived through a culture’s art. Her postcards documented surface Cascade, a Cascade that should be remembered, yes, but The Black Veil recorded an episode that also needed to be remembered. She couldn’t let it go to a private collection, but she could show it, send it out into the world. Perhaps now that was the only way Jacob would ever see it.

  When she returned to New York, she delivered it to Maxie.

  39

  Dez had already found that with art, with the whole idea of “career,” that getting what you wanted was satisfying only on one level. It was the same sort of satisfaction you might feel when you’d made a list for your busy day, and at day’s end, ticked off each accomplishment. For example, perhaps you’d longed for, dreamed of winning, the Huntington Prize, had imagined how it would feel, but when you had actually won the Huntington Prize, you were already back at your easel, trying for something else.

  Real satisfaction came when inspiration and effort magically took flight at the easel—the satisfaction that had come the submerged week of painting that she still remembered with cocoonlike warmth. Did she feel different when she showed The Black Veil at the New New York Gallery and it won the Huntington Prize? When the Whitney purchased it? Not really. And that was the thing about art, about any artistic endeavor where you gathered all the energy and emotion that surrounded you and tried to paint it, write it, sing it. It was never quite enough. There was always the impulse to try for better, for purer.

  It was just coincidence—a coincidence Dez never noticed—that the shape of Cascade resembled the shape of the European continent, that the river and basin formed the shape of the state of Germany.

  Maxie showed it in September of 1939, just after Britain and France declared war on Germany. The critics started a buzz about it, then George Biddle, the friend of President Roosevelt who conceived the W.P.A., saw it, and all of a sudden The Black Veil was being interpreted as an anti-Nazi painting. The editor of Life magazine, Henry Luce, a major proponent of U.S. interventionist policy, reproduced it in the pages of his magazine as part of his ongoing campaign to rouse public support for that policy in the press and on the airwaves.

  It made her name.

  Life wanted to do a story on D. H. Spaulding but he didn’t exist. Maxie counseled: “You have to keep the mystique going. If you come out and take the credit for what you’ve done—then there’s no mystique anymore. Instead you’re a pretty girl and people come out with their claws. I can guarantee that there won’t be quite the same respect for you, my girl, as there is for this dignified-sounding D.H., whoever the fuck he is.” She laughed hard, and her laugh by then was raspy, because she smoked Chesterfields night and day.

  Dez really had no one else to advise her. She sensed that Maxie was right. But what was the point of creating something if she couldn’t partake in the discussion about it? And now critics were looking back at the Shakespeare series and remarking that all along, weren’t they prophetic, using the universal truths found in Shakespeare to make statements about the current, earthly turmoil?

  She came the closest she ever had to opening Portia’s casket, thinking that if she had an idea of what her father put in there, an idea of what he had thought was “infinitely” worth saving, she might extract some wisdom from his choice, might find an answer for herself. Art lasted past the artist; she had lived by that creed her father had believed in. It almost didn’t matter who she was. Like every generation, hers was likely ignoring people who would go down in history while many of those getting so much acclaim, like herself, would have their names turn to dust along with their bones.

  Regardless of whether there was some form of afterlife, Dez knew that when it came right down to it, she wanted to be recognized as the artist of the work she had done in this life. And she wanted Jacob to know that she was who she was: D. H. Spaulding. Surely, if anyone had guessed about Spaulding’s identity, he had?

  She had not seen him in four years.

  She romanticized him; she was aware of that. Romanticized him even when she dated other men—none of whom really interested her. One good reason for doing the interview was so that he could know, wherever he was, that she was the artist responsible for The Black Veil. She wanted him to see it
for what it really was—a painting for him, a painting about Cascade.

  And, her reasoning continued, if the painting was being seen by the general public as anti-Nazi, then there were better, purer, less personal reasons for wanting to show it, to be part of an interventionist push. The stories coming out of Europe had, with the years, grown impossible to read—most recently, the state-backed, two-night, glass-shattering storm of violence throughout Germany that had outraged the world. Germany was a black stain spreading over the continent, gobbling up more and more of the European capitals, and the threat didn’t stop at Europe’s borders. In winter, American Nazis had held a rally at Madison Square Garden. The rally leader turned out to be a petty criminal with big dreams, and the rally was followed by a larger “Stop Germany” march down Fifth Avenue, true, but the easy spread of the ideology was chilling, all the same.

  “What glisters might be gold,” she told Maxie. “I’m going to do it.”

  In November 1939, the Life story came out. It was a typical day-in-the-life Life story, and what little political commentary there was got lost in the sudsy text. Once the editors realized that D. H. Spaulding was no man, the story’s political bent had gone out the window. The photographs showed Dez painting in her flat, showed her riding the trolley to the office. She is not your average bohemian artist, the copy said, living in Greenwich Village. Miss Spaulding lives on the west side and shops for her hats at Macy’s, like any career girl.

  Of course the whole idea was a mistake. When she saw how corny and condescending the piece was, she burned with regret. There wasn’t the same respect and seriousness of tone that a piece about a man would have commanded. Or maybe it had nothing to do with her being a woman, but about her being so foolish as to allow herself to be photographed buying a hat. She should have been photographed in Camden’s smoking a Lucky Strike. It was the fact of her normalcy, her hats, her job. Suddenly, D. H. Spaulding was a bore.

  Although she’d finally confided in Abby and Amy, other colleagues at the League were funny—miffed, mainly—about their exclusion from the big secret. Dez pointed out that the evidence had been there all along, right in front of them. It wasn’t her fault that people assumed D.H. was a man. Of course, plenty of people, like Mr. Washburn and most of her colleagues at the Standard, thought the Life story was a great coup.

  Art lives after the artist. She tried to hang on to that sentiment, but it was cold comfort, and sometimes not even true. Sometimes art turned to dust: burned, lost, destroyed, forgotten. What was it all for, if not for someone with whom to share it? She understood the sense of isolation Jacob must have felt back in Cascade; she felt it now herself. What hurt most was that she heard from Sidney Orenthal, who knew someone who knew him, that Jacob had left New York City well over a year before, sometime in late 1937 or early 1938, to take a teaching post in New Haven.

  Their paths were not going to cross; he had never wanted them to cross. Theirs was not some great Russian love affair. It was a small thing, tightly wound, and it had strangled on itself.

  She didn’t paint anything for a while. It seemed she had nothing left to paint, and she didn’t know who she was: Dez Spaulding, Dez Hart, D.H.

  She realized, too, that she did not care for people noticing her, pointing her out on trolleys, asking if she was the girl artist they had seen in Life. Was there really a whole town under water, they would ask? Did books really float out of library windows?

  It was an isolating time, but like all bad times, it got better.

  In April, James Lawrence King, returning from a monthlong trip to South America, sent a telegram expressing his astonishment, and to say he looked forward to seeing more of her work. When she wrote to thank him, she mentioned that her father had said he would like to reopen the playhouse with The Tempest. It is not only remarkable that you were the one who bought the painting, it is oddly fitting, don’t you think?

  After all the stir of “girl artist,” Clem Greenberg championed her in an article in Art News. He balanced the buildup and criticism by focusing attention on her paintings. Where the focus should be, he wrote. The tide began to turn in that way no single person can ever really control. People started looking for her work around the same time that Dez realized she had to get back to it, and take her work in a new direction, regardless of how people might receive it.

  She began experimenting with eliminating color and with emphasizing line and form, producing what became her New York Subway Series: seven stark, simplified black-and-white scenes inspired by riding the IRT. Maxie showed the series in June and five of them sold within two weeks.

  What a whim success could be, what a fluke, Dez thought. But she was grateful for that fluke. In the fall of 1940, she bought a modest but high-ceilinged apartment on Central Park West, with a sunny living room that she turned into a studio, where she plunged back into color and completed Color Studies: five five-foot-high abstract explorations of color that appeared to shimmer and pulse, thanks to a subtly undulating base of thick plaster that she covered with sheets of hand-hammered silver leaf. Maxie showed the series in December, and James Lawrence King bought #4, Blue. His note to Dez, her reply, turned into regular correspondence. In March of 1941, he wrote to say that he planned to turn his attention to the playhouse within the coming months. In September, he wrote that renovation was already under way. He was wiring the building for electricity and steam heat. He had also decided to punch out an addition—“still in keeping with the Elizabethan look of the place, not to worry”—that would add space for new, separate, ladies’ and gents’ rooms, as well as a drinks bar. Italian craftsmen would refinish the woodwork and build what was needed. A team of seamstresses in Connecticut would make new seat cushions. In the spirit of what was, an assistant had located a textile factory that could duplicate the gold-flecked red velvet Dez’s mother had chosen for the original cushions.

  Dez phoned the number engraved at the top of his stationery. A receptionist put her through to his secretary, and then finally to him, and his voice, when he came on the line, sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her.

  She said she was phoning to thank him for all he’d done, for the cushions, especially. She told him how incredibly touched she had been, to hear that.

  “Well, we can’t forget who founded the theater, can we?” His voice was charming in a way she now, vaguely, remembered from that day she’d met him so briefly.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “or should I say, hoping, that you would paint the poster for the opening production. Unless you’d like me to use your Tempest?”

  “I’d like to do a new poster,” she said, realizing that it was true. “I’d like to put my father in it.” She could immortalize him as Prospero. She added that now seemed the right time to mention that she had little desire to be directly involved in the production. “I’ve been hoping we can choose a staff—a director, all that—and let them do what they do best,” she said. “I am most definitely not my father.”

  “I’ll get someone on it, start advertising,” he said. “I have to be in New York in January, and probably February, too. It’s looking to be a busy year, ’42. Why don’t we plan to interview people then? I’m assuming you’ll at least want to be part of that.”

  She did, of course, and during that call, they decided on a date for the grand reopening. Thursday, August 6, 1942, a little less than a year away. For the first time in a long time, Dez found herself looking forward.

  Instead, the war came. A week after Pearl Harbor, King sent a terse telegram. THEATER PLANS DELAYED INDEFINITELY. Another week after that, a handwritten letter arrived, one of apology and invitation. Can I make it up with a New Year’s dinner at 65 Irving when I’m in the city next week?

  40

  August 1947

  Dez rode the Connecticut Central north, early on a mild August morning. James and most of his contingent would take the Philadelphia train; Abby and the New York group were motoring up.

  She wanted to be by herself on this
trip. She wanted the lull and comfort of the train’s clacking wheels, the sway of the carriage back and forth. She wanted to rest her forehead against cool glass and watch Connecticut flash by. The countryside was changing—there were more roads and filling stations, fewer fields. Where cows used to gape at the trains flashing by, developments of small houses were popping up.

  Portia’s casket and a copy of the opening-night program rested on her lap. For the program’s cover and accompanying poster, she had painted a great, swirling wind blowing a ship onto an island where the lone figure of William Hart as Prospero stood with arms outstretched, in welcome, in wait, and as if to embrace infinity.

  She had placed advertisements in newspapers in major cities across the country, announcing the reopening of the Cascade Shakespeare Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts. She wanted anyone who cared, anyone who had an interest, to have the opportunity to see it again, and in truth, there was a vague hope that Jacob would see and respond to one of the ads. It had been years since that day he walked out of her apartment, since she sent that last, unanswered letter, but she’d never let go of the feeling that seeing him once again was somehow necessary, and probably inevitable.