Cascade (34 page)

June drew to a close. The talk about Jacob and Dez died down, as Asa had declared it would. In his desire to suppress gossip, he did not tell anyone about overhearing Lowell confirm that Cascade was doomed. Zeke returned from a trip to Boston on July 1 and mentioned that his friend at the State House thought the deal was sealed: Cascade would be chosen. People gathered in the streets, in the Handy and the Brilliant and in Spaulding Drug and the Criterion Theater to talk, to mull over what was fact and what was still speculation.

The first week of July, none of the week’s newsreels were light. One delivered news of another dust storm in northern Kansas—spotted, crackling pictures that revealed a black sky raining dirt as a single car tried to escape it. Another announced that the Führer had decreed the Mauser K98k to be the main battle rifle of the Third Reich. The third posed a question: Would Japan, too, adopt fascism? The news was the sort that usually made people want to hunker down in their homes, but now Cascade faced homelessness, displacement, and for its residents, public places had become more homelike, more comforting, than wood-and-shingle
dwellings that could soon fall to bulldozers. A newsreel team filmed the Independence Day picnic on Cascade Common, festivities that were somewhat frenzied, everyone knowing that they could be the last festivities the common saw.

With focus off her, Dez felt ready to slip away to New York, but at night she couldn’t quite believe that she would really go. She knew she must, that she would never get another chance if she did the weak, safe thing now. She fought sentimentality every day.
Soon I will never climb these steps again, never open this cupboard, turn this faucet, turn down this bed
. At night, she lay awake, Asa asleep beside her, her heart quietly beating. Only so many beats in one lifetime. She tried to grasp what it would be like to sleep somewhere else, in a strange bed in a building she didn’t yet know. New York was real, with smells and sounds and sidewalks, but until you were actually in a place, that place felt inaccessible, static.

She vacillated, but most of the time she was afraid to go. She was afraid to board the train and head off to the unknown. She would have to find a place to live; she would have to get all her belongings there; she still had to hound Lowell about moving the playhouse. She sent him a reminder, and received a terse “working on it” note in reply. In her worst moments, she was so overwhelmed that she was close to calling off the move. It would be so easy, so safe, to stay with Asa, who had turned out to be so tolerant, in his way. She would turn her head and watch him sleep, his chest rising up and down, and marvel at how people could remain so committed to institutions and rules. To him, she was his wife in the most legal sense of the term. If he could turn back time, would he still want to marry her? She thought the answer would be no. So why did he want to hold on? He had made no move to touch her, but he wanted her in their bedroom because they were still married. He predicted she would get to New York and regret it. “You’ll be home within a month,” he said. In the meantime, he had no intention of letting people know the truth and planned to say that she was working on a project down in New York, a project with vague deadlines.

Dez indulged him. She packed a single trunk and conceded that he might very well be right. Asa told her that he had looked into where she
should stay, and that the best place was the Barbizon, known as a safe haven for independent women in the city.

A hotel stay was temporary by its very nature. Dez had no intention of living in a hotel. She would feel settled, able to truly judge living on her own, in the city, only in her own place. But she didn’t tell him that, and she turned down the money he pressed on her until he insisted; Dez was still his wife. He was hardly going to let his wife go off without funds.

Her leave-taking on the morning of July 15 was calm and without theatrics or animosity, but it was strange. Strange to have Asa carry her trunk downstairs and load it into the Buick. Strange to inhale the fresh morning air, the kind of air that promised a lazy summer day, and climb into the car thinking how unnecessary this really was. No one was making her move. She didn’t have to move. She rested her hands in her lap, feeling an acute sense of embarrassment, as if she were drawing attention to herself in a way that was melodramatic and unjustified.

Asa was quiet in the car. She supposed he hadn’t really believed it would come to this. He grimly started the engine and drove down the driveway.
I’m really leaving
, she thought with rising panic.

They traveled down River Road, past the decaying summer homes. Would she see them again? They could start tearing places like this down very soon. The car rumbled over the Cascade River bridge and she talked about the
Standard
to fill the silence. It was a good thing she would be able to sit in on all the early meetings, she said. She didn’t know that she would be able to do the series, otherwise. “Mr. Washburn said the editorial board’s been so pleased with my Cascade work that they really want me to guide the direction of the new series. It’s an honor, don’t you think?”

Asa nodded noncommittally. He turned left onto Spruce Street and pulled up in front of the train station. He got out and came around to Dez’s side of the car to open the door. “Hopefully,” he said, “the new series will do more for the country than the other one did for Cascade.”

Her eyes smarted as he walked into the station to get the porter, part of her close to saying,
What am I doing? Drive me home
. He returned with Albie Ray, the stunted little porter, who hefted her trunk onto a dolly and wheeled it away. They walked through the waiting room and onto the platform. The train was already on the tracks, quivering and throwing off heat like some fire-breathing beast. Asa appeared at once stoic and resigned and hopeful and bewildered. “So,” he said, his voice louder than necessary, speaking for the sake of other people nearby. “I guess you’ll go get your work done and let me know what’s going on,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, forcing herself to say no more, to make no promises. He helped her up the stairs and into her seat and pecked her briefly on the cheek, his lips cool and dry. He made a movement with his head that was both a shake and a nod, then climbed back down the narrow steps to wait on the platform.

Through the window, she met his eyes. Looking too happy would be cruel, but she couldn’t look mournful. She adopted what she hoped was a bucking-up, businesslike expression every time their eyes caught until finally, blessedly, the engineer blew two long whistles, then two short ones. The train began to grind out of the station, slowly at first. Asa raised his arm, eyes fastened on Dez, his figure quickly shrinking as the train rolled forward. She waved without looking directly at him. She was too afraid she would change her mind, that she would get off in Hartford and jump on the next train back, blubbering with cowardice and guilt. The train rolled past the common, past the back of the playhouse, which she glimpsed with a catch in her throat, then plunged into the woods, running along the river, taking her with it, moving her away from Massachusetts for the first time in almost five years. Miles passed, miraculously fast, farmers’ walls and birch groves a streaming blur.

She had known she would feel grief, regret, and fear at this moment, and she did feel all that, but as the train sped up, rushing and clacketing along the tracks, the woods and countryside falling away, she felt something else more fully: the lightness, the exhilaration, the chest-expanding relief of finally moving forward.

I
n spite of the increasingly urgent murmurings coming from across the Atlantic, Dez did not understand what had truly happened to Jacob during that brief, fluttering period of scandal in Cascade. It wouldn’t be until the
Life
story came out four years later, after the success of
The Black Veil
, when her life would have already changed so vastly, that she would really recognize the extent of the isolation Jacob must have felt that night a town pointed its collective finger at him. In the beginning, new in New York, she just wanted to find him.

She was only half an hour into the train journey when Cascade and her months as Mrs. Asa Spaulding began to feel as remote as the plot of a half-remembered movie. A staid porter maneuvered a tea cart down the aisle, and Dez was reminded of her school days, when she used to travel alone, by train, back to Farmington. No matter how morose she felt at the station—her father bending down to kiss her cheek, slipping some wrapped surprise into her pocket, assuring her that Christmas was just around the corner—she would, within minutes of the train’s departure,
be strangely happy to be exactly where she was: in her own company and settled into her plush velvet seat, face turned to the window.

She was enveloped by that sense of self-sufficiency, arriving in New York late Monday afternoon. How easy to disembark amid the fumes and noise of Penn Station, to tip the porter, to hail a hackney cab and find her way to the Barbizon Women’s Hotel on East Sixty-third Street. Easy to register, to explain that she would just be staying a couple of nights. Easy to fall asleep on clean cotton sheets, ears filled with the muffled sound of car horns and footsteps and voices. And easy to spend Tuesday exploring flats with the apartment representative recommended by the Barbizon desk clerk.

By three o’clock, she had chosen a one-room, furnished flat with bath on West Seventy-fourth Street between Central Park and the Hudson River. It cost fifteen dollars and fifty cents a week, more than she thought she would have to pay, but it was safe and clean, with three large windows that let in a steady north light. She crossed her fingers that the job at
The American Sunday Standard
would be hers for as long as she wanted it, for the first time feeling for herself the undercurrent of anxiety that had plagued people everywhere these past years: How much worse can things get? If I have a job, how long can I keep it? What will I do if I lose it?

Back at the Barbizon, she tucked inside one of the phone booths off the lobby. She perched on the small seat and counted out nickels from her purse, depositing one into the slot and waiting for the operator to take the call.

It was four o’clock. Mrs. Raymond would have gone home; Asa was likely alone in the drugstore, puttering in the back room, or mixing a soft drink for a late-afternoon straggler. Her stomach pitched with dread, waiting through the connections, until his voice came through, faint but clear, “Spaulding Drug.”

His response to her announcement—“I’ve found an apartment”—was silence, a blind chasm that she talked into, her voice like an echo, providing the address, explaining that there was no lease, the agreement was
tenant-at-will. She wasn’t sure if the nonbinding agreement was for his sake—indulging the pretense that she was in New York temporarily—or if it was a means of giving herself a way out. She hoped she wouldn’t resort to that, whatever happened. Wouldn’t resort to the weak way out.

“Asa?” If only he would say something. “Do you hear me?”

Finally, he spoke. “I’m just wondering how long it’s going to take you to get this out of your system.”

She pulled the receiver from her ear and looked at it a moment. It was a thing, a piece of hard, black Bakelite. She was tempted to simply hang it up, but when she put it back to her ear, he was already gone.