Cascade (33 page)

She shook her head, blinking back emotion. “I don’t know.” She started
to walk away—where she was going she did not know—but Dwight stopped her.

“Hold on!”

She turned back hopefully, as if he might possibly say something that would change anything, help anything. He held up the
Standard
. “Would you mind autographing this?”

S
he ended up in the only place left that felt like sanctuary—the playhouse, where she paced the aisles, her thoughts a scramble, all of them edged with uncertainty. Uncertainty, the hardest state of mind to bear. She had to take stock of her situation. Jacob might want nothing more to do with her. She might have crossed the line with Asa; he might never return to being the reasonable man she knew. She supposed she would have to go stay in the hotel. She would have to be ready for the gossip, the frosty looks, the way people would cross streets and duck into doorways to avoid having to acknowledge her. She breathed in the old-wood smell of the playhouse—surely Asa wouldn’t see it destroyed, just to hurt her. The only good thing about a pregnancy would be that the playhouse would belong to the child.
A child of the union
, her father had stipulated. But the thought of pregnancy made something in her rise up hysterically. She couldn’t be pregnant, she simply couldn’t. A woman living alone with a baby in New York, living anywhere in the world, would have a difficult time of it without family, without at the very least a nurse, and could she make enough to pay for a nurse? Would that be the cruelest manifestation of irony—that she’d end up sunk in the endless toil of baby-caring? She’d envisioned her job at the
Standard
providing the means to spend her free hours on her painting, hours that a baby would suck dry.

But maybe she was not pregnant, maybe she was worrying over something that not only had not happened but would not happen.
There is a good possibility I am not pregnant
, she told herself. The thought was like being washed with sweet, cool water, but only briefly, and she knew she would go for weeks like this, alternating between dread and the airy possibility of escape, until she knew one way or the other. And if she was pregnant, well, there were ways, early on—strong medicines you could take, though the specifics were foggy and wrapped in old-folklore feminine mystery. Rose might know—but no, she couldn’t do that kind of thing, she just had to pray she wasn’t. God, how had she gotten to this point?
Just one child will make a difference in your life that you can’t imagine.
What was more a sign of fate than a baby? Maybe she was meant to have a baby, and twenty years from now she would know why and all would be clear to her. But oh, it was too bad children couldn’t be born already school-age and independent. She might not mind that so much, might welcome the kind of little companion she’d been to her father. What would his life have been like if the flu had taken Dez along with Timon and her mother, that terrible autumn? William Hart had died depending on her to make sure his legacy lived on. She would have to remain friendly with Asa. She would have to find some way to move the building—hound Lowell, save and scrape. Once she was in New York, she could seek out people with means who might help.

She climbed up to the thrust stage and walked across the boards, each footstep echoing up to the rafters. The ceiling paint had begun to peel in small, hanging spirals. She closed her eyes, wanting to reminisce, but she was too restless for that indulgence, and put her hands to her hips and looked around. How was a building moved, anyway? Would they take it apart and put it back together? Number each board, load them onto a truck, and cart them away? Or would they chain it whole to a flatbed, drag it inch by inch, yard by yard, the many miles it would take to reach a new home?

With a start, she heard the creak of dry hinges and peered down the rows of seats to the arched entryway. A man’s figure appeared in silhouette, making his way down the aisle. Asa.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

Dez slid off the stage, landing on her feet. At least the scary, out-of-character anger was gone from his voice.

“I want to make a deal,” he said.

“What kind of deal?”

His eyes flickered angrily. “The kind of deal you had no problem making with Lowell, that kind. A deal that benefits both of us.”

“What kind of deal?” she asked again.

“This kind: people are already talking, and maybe you don’t care about your reputation, but I care about mine, and whether you like it or not, we’re tied together. Now, you want to see this playhouse saved,” he said. “And I can say yea or nay to that.”

She nodded for him to go on.

“I want us to join forces, to present a united face as a couple over the next few days and weeks. To stop the talk in its tracks. I was just over at the Brilliant, and I let everyone who was there having breakfast know that my silly trusting wife had been talked into helping this conniver Solomon close up my dam. Everyone’s already talking about how he must have known he was in for money if the state was forced to purchase Addis Proulx’s land.”

“But that’s not true.”

“People believe it. And those people will tell more people, and if we stand by that story, stick together, then our reputations stay intact.”

“What about Jacob’s reputation?”

“Dez. Get something through your head. I don’t care about Jacob Solomon. They’re already thinking the worst of him. He doesn’t live here. I’ve lived here all my life and I will not become the butt of rumors and scandal and snickering.”

“I understand your position, but I can’t lie, Asa.”

“You already have lied, Dez. Countless times.”

She swallowed; she couldn’t deny it.

“You don’t have to say anything, just be by my side in the coming days and this will all die down soon enough, what with what we’re all facing anyway. Can you do that for my sake, for my reputation? For the sake of this playhouse?”

“You wouldn’t see this place destroyed, Asa.”

“Oh, really? You forget that no one else cares about it the way you do.”

She looked up at the strapwork ceiling, the painted gilt lion.
Life is a stage and all the people merely players
. He was blackmailing her, essentially. She had to make herself calm, remove emotion from the situation, gauge the long view.

“I can make things very difficult. I can go after him,” he said, “for trespassing, for damages.”

“You’re not that kind of person, I know you’re not.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Dez. I’ve been naïve, but no more. I’m done.”

“Asa, why would you want to be married to me if the only way you could have me was through blackmail? What kind of a marriage is that?” She tried to tell him, with her eyes, that she was serious, serious and sorry. “I’m going to New York. I have to give it a try.”

He lifted his chin. “I’m only asking you to stick by me for the next few weeks,” he said. “Is that so much to ask?”

“You mean put on a show while we live under the same roof? Oh, Asa, no. I’ll go to Mrs. Mayhew for the next couple of weeks. That’s what I’ve decided.”

His hand came slamming down onto the stage, even as he managed to control his voice. “This has come at me out of the blue. The reservoir, you—all of it. If you leave in the midst of all this talk, well, then, in for a penny in for a pound, so they say. You let them tear down our reputations, I will let them tear down this playhouse, I promise you. And I won’t give you a divorce, if that’s what you’re after. I won’t do it. But if you can manage,” he said, jerking his head to one side to hide his eyes, gone suddenly shiny and wet, “to show some consideration for me, and let me hold my head up in this town, then I might let you decide what to do with this place. I might allow that.”

She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “It will be awkward, living together in the house, knowing it’s a sham,” she said.

“More awkward,” he said, “to have the whole town whispering and talking behind our backs.”

Later, she would look back on that agreement, on how odd and businesslike and false it was even as she went through with it, spending the next weeks parading around town with Asa, plowing through those days conscious of her inner eye observing in dismay, constantly off-kilter, like stepping sideways.

They were not apart once, and she often caught Asa looking at her with concentration, as if he was trying to figure something out. They did things they had never done. They worked the fountain together. They hand-delivered prescriptions to the outlying towns and farms. They watched double-features—
The 39 Steps
,
Mutiny on the Bounty
. She overheard Jacob’s name on people’s lips—talk that died as soon as the speaker spied the Spauldings.

The closest she came to calling the whole deal off was the Thursday night they spent at the Brilliant. It was a mild, golden evening, and the Brilliant was bustling. Ike and Helen Whitby encouraged people to congregate there, even if they ordered only water, to talk about the reservoir. Everyone was rumbling about the threat and the dismal economy and the ineffectuality, or not, of President Roosevelt. At one point, there was a squabble about the latest buzz, something Charles Lindbergh was reported to have said: that the greatest danger of Jewish power lay in their ownership and influence in motion pictures and press and radio and government. “Damn right,” Dick Adams blustered as the door jangled and Al Stein and his wife, Judith, walked in. Dick’s back was to the Steins, and no one took any particular notice of their entrance, though the few who did notice said hello as the couple took stools at the far end of the counter, near the big plate window that looked out onto Main Street.

“Rosenfeld’s toadies are ruining our lives,” Dick said, waiting for the spattered laughter that the bastardization of Roosevelt’s name usually got. “They took us off the gold standard, they’re printing money at will, they’re manipulating everything we see and do. Decent men like Bud and I can’t get a job, and this takeover of our town? It’s all about money. Right, Bud?”

Bud, sitting with his wife at the counter, looked embarrassed and took a sip of his water. “I dunno, Dick.”

“Well, what did you see last night?” Pete Masterson nodded toward Dez and Asa, a serious nod, as if their answer would prove Dick right.

“See?”

“At the Criterion.”

“
Mutiny on the Bounty
,” Asa said, looking confused.

“There you go,” Dick said. “Bligh: Thalberg’s version of Hitler. Thalberg’s a Jew. Wants to stir things up, wants what Rosenfeld wants: renounce capitalism, sell us all out to communism.”

Asa eyeballed both Pete and Dick to point out Al and Judith, who sat stiffly at the counter. Pete shrugged to show he wasn’t sorry.

“You can’t blame everything on the New Deal, Dick,” Asa said.

“You mean the Jew Deal. But hey, at least there’s one less Jew around for you to worry about, Asa.”

Only Dez knew how infuriated he was, how much effort it took for him to stay calm, to rise and suggest to Dez that they get going.

During those awkward weeks, she hoped she would hear from Jacob; she did not. Two weeks after the worst of the gossip had finally died down, she gathered courage and phoned his house, praying that he or his sister or one of the children would pick up the line. Instead, the old woman answered and, recognizing Dez’s voice, went into a tirade. “I don’t talk to nobody from Cascade.” Pronouncing it Cas-ked. “He good man, always good. You to drown, I say—” and here she said something guttural and blunt in another language and hung up.

Dez hung up herself, trembling. Jacob was most likely in New York by now anyway. She would find him when she got there. She would find him and explain and apologize. She prayed that she would not have to confess to a pregnancy.

The idea obsessed her. Every night, she held her palm over her stomach, trying to detect some sign of life. In the morning she stood sideways and peered at her abdomen in the long mahogany pedestal mirror next to the closet, looking for signs. There was no swelling. Her breasts—did she
imagine they were more tender than usual? She couldn’t tell. She gnawed herself into such anxiety over the possibility that anxiety became something like resignation. If she was to be pregnant, she wanted the baby to be Jacob’s, and that was a wish that originated somewhere deep inside. She wasn’t sure how she would get through nine months of uncertainty, but trusted that once the baby was born, she would know. A dark-haired, dark-eyed baby would belong to Jacob, and she and Jacob would manage. At least that was what she thought when she was feeling optimistic. Other times, she remembered the day he said she reminded him of Rosetti’s Beatrice, that personification of purity and love. She had once searched the Cascade library, trying, in vain, to find a reproduction of that painting.

She felt so far from pure.

She kept up with her cards for the
Standard
: a historic look at an early Independence Day celebration one hundred years ago, paired with a speculative view of the proposed reservoir in twenty-five years—1960, a date that seemed as remote and unreal as 1860 seemed now.