Cascade (19 page)

In the morning, she bolted up from sleep, certain that Abby never received her telegrams, that Boydie’s brother lost the package, that Jacob—she had
no idea what Jacob might be thinking. She was a bag of nerves all day until the doorbell rang at one and she raced to greet the Western Union boy—Popcorn’s brother, she could never remember his name—waiting on the porch. She tore the telegram in half in her eagerness to open it and had to hold the two pieces together to read the message. Abby had picked up the package and walked it up to Forty-third Street to deliver it directly into Mr. Washburn’s waiting hands.
SHOWED SAMPLES OF MY OWN WORK TOO. HOPE YOU DON’T MIND.

Dez reread the last sentence, wondering exactly what kind of samples Abby had shown. She didn’t think she minded, no, but Abby lived just blocks from the
Standard
’s offices; she was primed to insert herself into any particular opportunity that might present itself.

She spent the day upstairs, washing the winter’s dirt from the windows, waxing the floors, scrubbing the bathroom with a bleach-and-powder combination. She tried not to visualize New York, or the
Standard
’s offices, or Mr. Washburn unwrapping and reviewing her work. She wished it was possible to have copied what she sent so she could look it over. In her mind’s eye, the paintings were not as wonderful as they seemed when she first finished them. She wished that Jacob could have looked at them, advised, judged. Had he even received the telegram, and if he had, what had he thought?

At four thirty, when the telephone jangled twice, she slipped on the stairs in her race to answer it, landing on her knee, hard. She scrambled up and into the kitchen.

“Hold for Gerald Washburn,” Lil said, the initial, foolish prick of disappointment swept away by the enthusiasm she heard in Mr. Washburn’s voice when Lil put him through.

He liked the work, he said, very much. In fact, their entire editorial team was quite enthusiastic. “I’m thinking, Miss Hart, that your idea for a serial might be a good one. We’ll build the tension and when the time comes for Cascade to be chosen, we’ll have the country biting its nails.”

And that was the hitch. His publisher, Mr. Washburn said, was willing
to go along with the serial if the imminent destruction of Cascade was certain.

“I thought our slant might be one that would root for saving Cascade.”

“Well, you made that sound unlikely. You
drew
it unlikely.”

Had she?

“Is it? Because it’s a great human story. The fact that our readers will be able to say to themselves, well, we may have lost our jobs, our daily bread, but we still have our homes, our towns, beneath our feet. That’s the angle we want to take.”

“I see.”

“If it’s not really a threat, if it’s all going to blow over, then we’d rather not invest the pages in it. Because if they take the other town, well, there’s obviously not the same kind of drama, as you yourself implied, what with library shelves emptied, and a hotel abandoned. I’m a bit confused here.”

The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows on the linoleum. She rubbed her knee where a bruise seemed already to be forming. He was waiting for her response. Of course the chances were high that the water board would choose Cascade—and of course she didn’t want it to, but if Cascade was fighting a losing game, there really was no sense in her losing an opportunity like this.

She hoped no one was listening in on the line. No Lil, no Alma. “Actually, Mr. Washburn, I know someone inside the water commission,” she said quietly, too quietly. She was forced to repeat herself when Mr. Washburn asked her to speak up.

“This man I know on the water commission. Well, he said that the state is just going through the motions.” Stan had practically said so.

“Well then,” Mr. Washburn said. “I’m making a gut-level decision here to go with this, but I like what you did. I think it’ll be a great feature. I’ll be in touch with you, probably on Monday—let you know the reaction we get. Assuming it’s well received, we’ll go ahead. All right? In the meantime, draw the next set and get them to me. We’ll pay you no matter what.
And if it’s all a go-ahead, then when the time comes that the town
is
dismantled, we’ll dispatch a photographer, too. Expand the story, make it even bigger.”

She placed the receiver back on the box. It was all happening so fast. Her paintings, even now, were being rushed into production, printed and duplicated, ready to be shipped off all over America. In three days she would see her work in
The American Sunday Standard
. But the
Standard
’s slant on the story of Cascade was going to be one of impending doom.

T
he days leading up to her issue’s release were the days that would, in retrospect, be hard to remember distinctly. Dez would remember agitation, and pacing, watching the sun rise over Pine Point. She would remember the banjo clock chiming the hours, the morning milk delivery turning into the morning mail delivery turning into the afternoon mail, the afternoon paper, and then the sun setting all over again. Thursday there was a slight, foolish hope that lessened as the day wore on that Jacob might show up. At sunset, she escaped the stuffiness of the kitchen and stood on the porch. A breeze blew up from the water, a strong, head-clearing breeze. It was just as well he never came, she thought. She was a foolish woman with a good husband, a husband who had suggested a celebratory meal at the Brilliant on Saturday evening, a husband who was so busy taking care of the town that he had called to say he couldn’t make it home for supper.

But the empty hours stretched ahead of her. The evenings were starting to grow long. Light lingered on the lawn, which was still a soft,
early-summer green, a green with bright yellow in it. She covered the meat loaf with a dampened tea towel and slid it into the still-warm oven. She pulled her hair back into a bun and slipped her feet into her loafers. A walk would be good. A walk to the falls, which felt wonderful once she was out there on the road, the breeze rippling her blouse, the pavement solid under her feet. She should walk every day. She had loved walking in Paris—along the river and up over the Pont Neuf to wander through the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis. Sometimes you needed to look up from your work, from yourself, blink your eyes—there was a sky up there, a vast expanse of air to breathe.

In town, the fresh air had brought people outdoors. A group of boys played some kind of tin-can-and-stick game on the common; a rummage sale was going on at Stein’s. Al Stein would be having plenty of those once he got his hands on the rest of Jacob’s inventory. Or maybe he already had it and she would never see Jacob again. It was possible, though painful and bewildering. So many people came into your life, and they were such a part of the everyday that it was impossible to imagine them gone until, one day, they were. There had been years of best friends at Farmington, and then Jane Park—eighteen months they’d lived together in Paris, close as cousins—and Pierre Denis, though she was always squeamish to remember him and how she had played at passion. It was Jacob who’d ignited something new, something hard to let go of.

At the Criterion Theater, the marquee had changed. The first feature was
Anna Karenina,
and this seemed immediately to be some kind of sign, as did the quarter she happened to have in her pocket. There, fate seemed to be saying, remind yourself what happens to wives who lust after other men.

Dez walked into the foyer. Zeke ran a Thursday night double-header every week, two movies for the price of one, and it was popular. Dez paid, took her ticket, gave it to the usher—one of Hartwell Page’s boys—and walked into the lobby, where she was immediately swarmed, treated like one of the film stars, someone joked. Elsie and Bill Smith, and Zeke, and the Pages, and Rose’s old friend Hazel Burns, who was there with Peter
Southwick’s widowed father—they all wanted to know every detail, or more precisely, to be a part of the excitement and anticipation. The issue would be out on Saturday, she confirmed, and the attention was gratifying and a little bit heady until she realized that everyone was certain the publicity would foster some kind of groundswell of support to save Cascade. Then she was eager to slink away to the back row, and grateful when the lights began to dim. But who knew? Maybe the postcards would indeed foster a groundswell of support. Maybe Mr. Washburn would himself be surprised. What was meant to happen would happen, she told herself.

Onstage, the curtains parted to the trumpet fanfare that introduced the newsreels. Images flickered in grainy black and white as that man with the voice who made everything sound so dire narrated the news: Roosevelt speaking to Congress, recommending that the United States maintain neutrality. King George and Queen Mary celebrating their silver jubilee, smiling and waving from a palace balcony. Then, an odd bit about a mysterious woman who wore a long black veil and showed up at Rudolph Valentino’s tomb in Hollywood every year on the anniversary of his death. The newsreel flashed to an image of Valentino on a beach somewhere—in close-fitting swim trunks, hands resting on his hips, hair slicked back off his face. The time he came to Cascade, he was not yet a film star but part of a traveling musical production that had used the theater for a week. Dez didn’t remember him—she’d been only eight or so—but for years after his visit, people talked about him. Even her own father got caught up, lamenting that he hadn’t nabbed him for a performance—what a perfect, narcissistic Orsino in
Twelfth Night
he would have made.

The bit ended with an image of the veiled woman, her arms full of roses, reaching up to place the flowers on top of his tall crypt.

Whoever she was, she was part of the mysterious passion that the man’s very existence had evoked. Dez remembered the hysteria, the news of the mobbed funeral in New York, the second funeral in Hollywood. The people who killed themselves—the woman in London who took poison, the boy in New York who first covered himself with photographs
of Valentino. If people could kill themselves over the death of a person they did not even know, then who knew how Dr. Proulx might have justified his own action?

Finally, the movie began, but from the start, it was all wrong. Fredric March was a stiff, unsympathetic Vronsky. Everyone except Garbo overacted, but she was too serious, too brooding. Karenin—he was simply an unsympathetic buffoon. And Dez had no patience with these movies that had people simply
looking
at each other and falling in love.
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind
. Where was the connection, what linked them together? Common interest? Understanding of the other? In the book, Vronsky so clearly saw and was attracted to Anna’s
nature
. The movie should show that, show her nature revealed somehow, should make clear that it was her soul that he loved.

Only the scenes between Anna and her child came off as sincere. Levin and Kitty, the heart of the novel—they barely graced this movie. The whole mess ended on a sentimental note, with Vronsky gazing at a photograph of Anna, remembering her well.

Nonsense
, Dez thought. How would Vronsky not instead have been haunted by that image of Anna crushed beneath the train? What lover could look fondly upon the portrait of a loved one who had committed such a wretched suicide?

T
he Sunday magazines always arrived in Cascade on the Saturday-afternoon train from Boston. Walking to town to buy her copy, Dez rehearsed how she would react. She would be pleased, very pleased, but she would—
she would have to
—be objective. She would see the
Standard
for what it was: a popular magazine that entertained all types—the discriminating and the not-so-discriminating. Her postcards were not oils gracing a wall in the Met. They were not frescos on a church wall in Italy. They were reproductions in a popular magazine, a magazine that would be replaced in exactly seven days.

She felt strong, in control of her emotions, but as she turned down Main Street and closed in on the Handy, her surroundings blurred and her senses heightened. It was clearly crowded inside, which could only mean that the issue had arrived. She paused to control the flutter in her stomach, then pushed on the swinging screen door and stepped over the threshold, conscious of heads turning her way, Zeke catching sight of her and shouting, the cluster of people echoing Zeke, beckoning her in, swarming around. There were congratulations, thanks, and
someone—Dwight, usually so bashful—sliding a copy into her hands and saying,
Here you go, Miss Famous Artist!

To have someone in Cascade refer to her so. To take the magazine into her hands, to hold it, knowing her work was inside. The pages were heavy and slick and smelled of fresh ink. Her hands trembled, checking the table of contents, skimming the pages to get to 34 and 35. There they were: colorful pictorials that pleased the eye. “The colors reproduced very well,” she heard herself saying. Her worry that they weren’t as good as she remembered was unfounded. The tiny details—the king’s crown, the floating books—were compelling and pleasing, the colors sharply rendered.

Dwight was the first to ask for her autograph, and she demurred, embarrassed. But he insisted, and then they all began teasing her until she finally said all right, and signed her name in the bottom right margin:
Desdemona Hart
.

Dwight lifted the magazine for all to see. “Look at that,” he said. His policeman’s badge flashed in the late-afternoon sunlight; the Handy’s resident cat mewed loudly from its perch in the window. Life seemed full of light and promise and it was permissible, Dez thought, to let go, to feel exhilaration and joy, like a kite she could release and release, all the while knowing she had her hand firmly on the string. Around the country, people were looking at her work, liking it. Here in Cascade, people were proud and hopeful. It was only for seven days, so why not revel in it?

How much they pay you?
someone asked, an indistinguishable voice that didn’t ask again when the crowd, with a brief, chilly silence, told the voice—it sounded like Tilly Allison—that the question was rude.