Cascade (37 page)

Back in her flat, she picked up Portia’s box. She held it a long while, even getting out the key.
Something infinitely worth saving
, her father had said. She played with fitting the key into the lock until, exasperated with herself, she pushed both items back onto the shelf and leaned out the middle window. It was a perfect, hazy summer evening, heavy with an enveloping humidity that mellowed the sounds of horns and streetcars and radios. A woman pushed a giant pram down the street; a small white terrier skipped and pulled from its leash; a man strode purposefully, newspaper tucked under his arm.

She wanted so badly to look down and see Jacob, had imagined it so often, that she became oddly still when she did see him, her heart seeming to stop, not believing that the person really was him, slowly walking down the street, checking the numbers on the buildings.

He glanced up. Their eyes met, and she was filled with relief and elation, even as she marked that he did not smile, wave, or shout. It didn’t matter. He could be subdued for any number of reasons. All she cared about was that he was here, finally, and she flew down the four flights of stairs to let him in.

Through the thick glass sidelight, she could see him on the landing, holding his hat, fingering the brim. He looked worried, guarded. She opened the door.

“Jacob,” she said uncertainly. “Finally.”

He met her eyes with a look that was apologetic and regretful. “I know I should have come sooner,” he said, “but I really didn’t know how to.”

She pushed down the anxiety that bubbled up inside her, and led him upstairs, trying to speak vivaciously, pointing out the doors that led to her colorful neighbors. They met Maria Petrova, on the second-floor landing, who said, “Is this the young man you wait for?” Dez was embarrassed to be found out, embarrassed and relieved.
Let him know
, she thought.
Let him know I’ve been waiting for him.
They could handle whatever was wrong. All that mattered was that he was here, finally.

But his noncommittal, forced smile increased her nervousness. By the time they reached her apartment, she was literally queasy and had to sit down. Jacob took in the room, noting the scraped canvas on the easel, the view out the windows. His gaze fell on the bed and darted away.

“Please. Sit.” She gestured to the ladder-back chair and offered a cold drink—or tea? “I don’t have coffee, but—”

“Nothing. Thanks.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “It was so awful—in Cascade.” She was close to stammering. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that. It was
all my fault. Do you remember I was about to tell you something when Dwight and Wendell and that man Lowell came in?”

He put up a hand to stop her. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t explain.”

“But I need to.”

“It’s done. And maybe it was all a good thing.”

Her eyes asked, why? How could what happened be a good thing?

“You find out what people are made of. You find out what you yourself are made of.” She didn’t like the way he spoke without looking at her. She tried to catch his eye but he looked at his hands, at the floor, everywhere but at her. “I thought I could stand the obstacles we would have to face together, if we ever were together,” he said. “But when something like this happens, you realize who you are and where you come from and nothing’s ever going to change that, and you think about children and raising them, and do you give in to your own selfish impulses?”

What was he talking about? They were both in New York. She was free. He was free.

“At first, I hoped you would call, write to me, something,” he said.

“But I did call,” she said eagerly. “Your mother hung up on me.”

“Ah,” he said, as if something had been made clear. “Well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter anyway,” he said. “Because what’s the point, really, of all of this?”

“Of what?”

He gestured to her easel, to the city beyond the window, the approaching storm. “All of it.” The room grew darker, she could no longer clearly see his face. “You can smell the rain.”

“Yes.”

“You know, on my way here I stopped in to that cathedral on Fifth Avenue. I’d never been inside a Christian church before. Have you been in it?” When she shook her head no, he described the marble floor, the vaulted ceiling, the banks of candles flickering inside red glass votives. “Every footstep echoes in a place like that. I suppose that’s the intent.”

She listened, waiting for his point.

“Isn’t it strange, Dez, that we never see certain parts of ourselves? Our backs, our lungs, our hearts. We never know what it really is to sit across from ourselves.”

“No,” she said. “But—?”

“And does it matter? And does religion really matter all that much? It doesn’t matter to my tubes of paint, to the canvases I manage to produce. It only matters in places like churches and temples, in homes like my mother’s. That man on the cross was a Jew, and if people hadn’t believed in the idea of him being a messiah, the start of something new, you and I might not have seemed so different.”

“We’re not,” she said, shaking her head, confused. “Why are you saying all this?”

“Because it’s already done.”

“What’s done?”
Look at me
, she thought.
Take my hand. Anything
.

“Ruth is pregnant,” he said. And he didn’t repeat himself, but the words echoed in her head; they rolled around in it for days.

She shut her eyes, shut them as if shutting them tight would squeeze away what he’d said. Everything receded—noise, boundaries, the sound of his voice as she counted backward in her head. If Ruth was pregnant now, then he was having much more of a relationship with her than he had ever let on. She felt suddenly nauseated, and heard his voice as if it were somewhere far outside herself.

“After what happened in Cascade, I went back to Springfield and there was Ruth. A comfort.” Planned words. Words that were like so many lines in a play. “Perhaps refuge. A mistake.”

A mistake
. She would cling to that. He returned to Ruth and Ruth was a mistake. “So what are you going to do?”

He looked at her wordlessly.

“You’re going to marry her,” she said. And when he didn’t reply, the obvious took so much of her voice away that she could only whisper, “You already have.” She barely heard the rest of what he said, that he and
Ruth shared the same background, after all, that children were best raised that way, it seemed. Her throat closed up, so painfully tight it was impossible to breathe. What kind of grief was this? It was not what she felt when her father died. It was something new, something worse, because it was poisoned with a jealousy that made her hands clench, her nails dig into her palms, ready to turn her into the animal scratching at her insides.

“Dez,” he said. “It was the right thing to do and you were married anyway, and it’s all been a mess, hasn’t it? And I’m thirty-two, I suppose it’s high time I became a father and—Ruth is Jewish. We’ll raise the child the way we know how.”

Her eyes filled; she couldn’t control them.

“I have to think it was meant to be, that it’s for the best.” But his eyes were like a cartoonist had drawn them: two dazed spirals spinning into infinity.

“You talked yourself into it,” she said as if she could talk away the facts, turn back time. As if by proving that he had, he could somehow undo what he had done. “What is she like? I don’t even know.” Needing a picture of Ruth in her mind even as she tried to blot her out. Wanting Ruth, on some level, to be a pale version of Dez, someone he had dated only because he couldn’t have the real thing.

“Ruth,” he said, the speaking of her name an abrupt expulsion of breath, “is—a regular girl. She was a typist at Waterman’s until the plant closed.”

“A typist.”

The wind was blowing a heavy branch to and fro, making it scrape the far window. He fixed his gaze on it. “Don’t, Dez.”

She couldn’t help it. She had to punish herself, had to make the pain as bad as it could be so that she would know where its end was. “When is the baby coming? Where are you living?”

“Winter,” he said bleakly. “We’re down on East Third Street. A cold-water walk-up.”

So they were living in poverty. “What about your inheritance?” She
said the word too bitterly and his face drained of color, and she was sorry. Sick and sorry. She said that she was sorry. “I don’t want to be cruel.” Though a part of her did, a part of her was burning with bitterness toward Ruth. Ruth! Who was Ruth to take him away? And who was Jacob to let himself be taken? Did he never feel what she thought he felt? Or did what he feel not really matter to him? What mattered to a man?

“It could be years before I see any of that, if I do,” he said. “Other beneficiaries, like Dorothy King, have formally protested the will. I don’t even care, to tell you the truth.”

“What about the W.P.A.? Did you get in?”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll be put on the Easel Project. Thankfully.” The Easel Project was reserved for real talent. Would she, if she was needy enough, be put on the Easel Project? Or was it really just for men?

“Though it won’t be as much of a salary as we all hoped,” he said. “Twenty-three dollars and eighty-six cents a week.”

She challenged him, voice ragged. “What if I had been pregnant? What would you have done?”

His eyes closed. “I didn’t even want to think that might happen.”

“It could have. It might have. What would you have done?”

“Dez—” He got to his feet. “I have to go. I shouldn’t be here. I just couldn’t leave you wondering after I saw your message.” He flushed. “In the postcard, I mean. The Rossetti? At least I thought you—”

“No, you’re right.” He’d seen, he’d understood. There was some happiness to know that. But it didn’t matter, did it, because he was married to Ruth Sondheim—to Ruth Solomon. Ruth Solomon was pregnant.

He was actually putting on his hat, ready to close the door on her, to walk out, to leave. “So that’s it?” She rose to her feet. “We no longer have a friendship, nothing, because suddenly you’re married, when all along I was married, still am married?”

A pulse beat along his jaw. He didn’t meet her eyes. But he also didn’t move to leave.
Twilight, Cascade Common
, the painting she had painted with him, hung beside the door. She ran her fingertips over the thick
layers of paint, feeling where she, where he, had laid down brushstrokes. She wanted to touch him, and knowing she couldn’t was the worst kind of rejection. Here they were, two people alone in a room, forbidding themselves. “How can we live in the same city and not see each other, Jacob?”

He rested his hand on the doorknob. “Sometimes things are as they must be,” he said, “not as they ought to be.”

Nonsense!
she wanted to cry.
Don’t be so bloody high-minded
. “Just tell me. Tell me what you would have done if I’d told you I was pregnant?”

“Oh, Dez—” An ambulance wailed through the open window. He waited until the sound grew faint. “I measure things,” he said finally, turning the doorknob, opening the door. “I weigh things. You’re still married. Your child would have a name, a father. Ruth’s would not.” He looked like he had just figured that out, and that the logic of his conclusion made him feel better, more resolved. “I’m so sorry, but life is full of tough choices between less-than-perfect alternatives.”

And then he was gone. She stood on the threshold, listening to his steps swiftly descending the stairs. She ran to the window and watched him emerge from the entrance and head east toward Broadway. The rain had started, hitting the pavement in fat wet drops; he hunched forward into it and never looked back, never looked up.

Ten minutes later, Maria Petrova knocked on her door, expecting to hear the excited babble of a young woman in love, and found her blubbering instead. Dez told her everything, every detail, expecting that Maria would recoil, but Maria was an old woman and had seen more in life than Dez’s sorry tale. “Cry and get it out,” she said. “Then get over it, because it wasn’t meant to be.”

Dez had spent weeks believing that fate had steered her toward New York and Jacob. She didn’t want to hear that Jacob wasn’t meant to be. She spent a ferocious week at the
Standard
, immersing herself in work. She had been given a week to produce each postcard, a preposterously
generous amount of time considering how fast she’d worked in Cascade. In just two days, she produced her most tumultuous card to date: the twisted wrought iron, soaking rain, and spiraling wind of the tornado that spun through New Orleans in March 1934, flattening everything in its way.

O
ddly enough, it was Abby who reminded Dez why she was in New York, who propelled her into the frame of mind she needed to be in to paint
The Black Veil
.

On Friday Dez was at work, at her drawing board, when she heard Abby’s unmistakable husky chirp coming from Mr. Washburn’s office around the corner. Through the din of the typewriters and voices around her, Dez’s ears pricked up, hand and pen mindlessly working the paper until a shadow fell across her desk. Abby stood there, regarding her pertly. Her lips were bright red, her hair full and curly.

“Weren’t you going to let me know you were in town?”

There was something hurt in her face, and Dez felt bad, seeing that, until Abby said, “You know, Dez, I didn’t think you had it in you. I am shocked and amazed that you’re here.”

“That’s quite a comment coming from someone who used to pant after me like a puppy.”

Abby laughed. “But I
was
a pup then.” She perched herself on the edge
of Dez’s desk, filling the air with the smell of her spicy perfume, her leathery handbag, her cigarettes. “Where’s your Jewish painter? Did you run away with him?”

Dez’s silence made Abby smirk. Then she looked at Dez more closely. “Tell me you slept with him, at least.”

“Shh.” Dez glanced around to make sure no one had heard. “Don’t you realize what you did? You tried to take my job.”

“Don’t you get it yet? It’s every man for himself.”

“We’re not men.”

“Oh, don’t play the saint. Look what you’ve done, you’ve gone and told them my idea was yours.”