Cascade (43 page)

The drinks arrived on a silver tray and looked appealing, with a rich amber hue and fat cherry garnish. Dez, expecting it to taste sweet, sputtered when the first sip was surprisingly harsh.

Maxie laughed. “That’s bourbon for you,” she said, turning to a man who had paused by their table.

“What’s next, Maxie?”

“Nothing till the end of March,” she said, waving him away with a laugh. “You think I’d spend a winter here? No thank you.” She fished the cherry from her drink and popped it between her lips.

“You have a show planned for March?” Dez asked.

“Uh-huh. Ciggy?”

Dez took a cigarette from the pack, and before they could light them, the waiter reappeared to flick a silver lighter. Maxie lit up. She would be in Miami in two weeks, she said. “Have you been there? No? This style”—she waved a hand—“is everywhere. Toots’s place looks like an ocean liner.” She might do a place of her own down there, she said, and talked
about glass brick walls and Bakelite doors. Dez only half-heard. Here she was, having a drink with Maxie Eisenberg. Shouldn’t she try to get Maxie to look at her work? She already knew that Maxie was contemptuous of timidity, so waited for the right pause in the conversation then said, as confidently as she could, “If you’re having a new show, you need to see my Shakespeare series. After this, we could walk across the park and have a look at them.”

Maxie narrowed her eyes and pursed her mouth, tugging on her lower lip while she considered. “Let’s have another drink. Then I suppose we can cab over.”

“Great,” Dez said coolly. The next hour, she was almost afraid to breathe, afraid that mercurial Maxie would turn petulant and change her mind. And what if they got to her apartment and Maxie made some kind of pass? She swallowed hard. She would just have to take the risk and deal with that if it happened, behave the way she would behave toward any man who did that—be nice and express some thanks.

When they finished their cocktails, Dez insisted on paying the bill, to level the playing field. Outside, the night air had grown chilly. The doorman lifted a gloved hand and a cab glided forward.

At Dez’s, Maxie complained about the lack of an elevator. On the third landing, she laid her hand on the banister and paused to breathe heavily. “For Christ’s sake.”

Dez never had visitors. She lived too far uptown and, frankly, liked keeping her small space private. “Just one more flight,” she coaxed, relieved when they reached the fourth floor and she could fit her key into the lock.

As soon as Maxie entered the apartment, she turned all business, walking straight up to
The Black Veil
, folding her arms and inspecting it. “Oh, my dear,” she said. One red fingernail tapped at her front teeth. “Oh, my dear.”

Dez waited, watching Maxie’s unsmiling face. A full minute passed.

“You weren’t kidding me, were you? Well, you’ve got yourself a sale. I’ll take this.”

“Oh, no. I—” She hadn’t expected Maxie to make such a fast decision. “I can’t sell that one. I meant for you to see—”

“Excuse me?”

It was Jacob’s painting. If Dez lost control of it, he would likely never see it. “That one’s private. It’s not anything I want to part with.”

“You drag me up here and then tell you don’t want to ‘part with’ it?” Maxie mimicked her. “They’re not your babies. They’re your full-grown adults and what you do is send them out into the world. Now do you want my help or don’t you?”

“Of course I do, but you’ve come to see the Shakespeare canvases.” Dez quite firmly led Maxie to the large closet where the Shakespeare canvases leaned, one behind the other, against the wall.

Maxie looked a long time, silently, at the first one, the interlocking
Macbeth
. Then she lifted it away and set it against the wall to examine the next one,
The Tempest
. Then
Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Hamlet
. She studied them all quietly, finally breaking her silence to speak almost languidly. “I just love that you’ve got a series.” She fingered
Othello
—up close, a smearing of shapes and color, but from a distance: the distinct impression of towering black rage, of violated, martyred white, of crimson.

“D. H. Spaulding,” she said, as if to herself. “D. H. Spaulding.” She turned to face Dez decisively. “Do you want to start a stir?”

“What kind of stir?”

“How much do you care about fame, about instant fame?”

Dez had had a small taste of instant fame with the postcards. It was cheap, and it wasn’t enduring, she knew that. Still, she had enjoyed the recognition.

“Because I’m thinking that these paintings could cause a stir. But it might be better if they came out of the blue, if no one really knew much about the artist, and also—” She paused. “If the artist was assumed to be male. There’s something very masculine about these, such an internal, emotionally raw look to them.”

Seeing Dez’s reaction, Maxie softened. “It’s just the way it is, hon.”

“That doesn’t make me resent it any less.”

“Well, I like that you’ve signed them D. H. Spaulding.”

“Spaulding is my legal name.”

“Is it? Well, I like it, the initials. Very neutral. Everyone you’ve met at the League, everyone in town, knows you as Hart, right? Has anyone seen these? No? We could show them and leave them all wondering who the hell painted them.”

Dez hesitated. The honest response was that yes, she wanted to see her paintings shown in Maxie’s gallery, but she wanted to be at the party, wanted to engage in discourse about the paintings, as herself, the acknowledged artist. And yes, she wanted to bask in any glory they might bring.

But something, maybe misguided pride, made her go with the noble answer—that art lasted, not the artist. “If you think your idea is a good one,” she said, “I suppose we could give it a try.”

Maxie unveiled the Shakespeare series in the March show she called New New York News. Nobody bought any of the canvases on opening night, but they started a buzz, as did the fact that the artist didn’t show up for the opening. D. H. Spaulding, whoever he was, preferred to let art speak for itself, so Maxie and the program notes, which carefully avoided the use of pronouns, said. Who was he, people wanted to know? Where did he study? “Let art speak for itself?” Was he some kind of hermit or simply pretentious?

Dez attended the opening with Abby and Amy Cantor, a new friend from the League, and it was hard to stay quiet. At first, she thought she wouldn’t have to. Although the six paintings, all different, showed her reluctance to stick to a particular style, there was a common look to them, almost ineffable, but there—an explosion of color, an underlying darkness—and surely the people she studied with would recognize this.
No one did, even though a couple of them, like Abby and Amy, knew that her husband’s name was Spaulding, that she used her maiden name, Hart, in New York. She expected that people would put one and one and one together.

Standing in front of the six paintings, hanging side by side on one long wall in Maxie’s gallery, Dez tested: she asked Abby outright, “What do you think of these?”

Abby shrugged. “I hate whoever the hell he is,” she said with a jealous, laughing-at-herself hoot, fumbling for a cigarette. “Where do you want to go after?”

Dez nudged the conversation back to the paintings. Abby really didn’t know her work, but she knew it better than anyone, and if she didn’t guess, she didn’t suppose anyone would. “Look, it’s strange. He’s got my name—well, my old name.”

“He does?” Abby inspected the paintings more closely. “Extremely strange. Who is he?”

“Maxie won’t say.”

Abby smirked. “Next you’ll tell me they’re really yours.” She paused to eye the paintings more carefully. “Wait a minute.” She laughed uncomfortably, as if she might be the butt of a joke. “These aren’t really yours, are they?”

Dez pointed out that D. H. Spaulding had wielded his brush with an intensity and freedom that Boston-trained Desdemona Hart had never come close to possessing.

A tall, languid-looking man turned to Abby, hat in his hands. “I’ve only ever seen
Hamlet
and I’m not a painter, but how did he get that messy search for identity down the way he did? It’s marvelous.”

Dez wanted to kiss him. His was the kind of reaction that made the struggle worthwhile. Though now she faced another struggle: the struggle not to reveal herself.

“And get it down,” the man continued, “in a way that makes me wonder who the heck I am?”

Abby edged up to him. “And who might that be?”

There was an instant connection between Abby and the man, which Dez recognized. It made her wistful. She left them alone and slipped away to be by herself, standing by a window that someone had opened to clear the room of cigarette smoke. The March night air was cold and fresh on her face, the street outside busy with cars and cabs and pedestrians hurrying by. She craned her neck to see the sky. Somewhere up there were the same stars that shone down over what was left of Cascade. Cascade, where people lived who’d never been to Boston, who’d been to Worcester only once or twice in their lives. She tried to comprehend that she had really lived there, that she could still be there, wringing laundry and pounding chicken breasts, looking up at the night sky with a longing to leave. If all the change hadn’t enabled her to go, would she really ever have left? Would she?

She turned away and, with her back to the window, sipped her wine and watched the people crowding the gallery. They paused in front of her paintings, and in front of Sidney Orenthal’s, James Prout’s, Max Braden’s.

It was wonderful. It was what she had always wanted.

After a new critic, Clem Greenberg, wrote that the Shakespeare series showed perhaps the freshest use of interpretive color he had seen in three seasons, and John Russell proclaimed them “paintings of the soul” in
The
New York Times
, an anonymous collector bought the sprightly, vivid
Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and James Lawrence King himself bought the roiling, whipped-cream
Tempest
. James Lawrence King, it turned out, was an avid collector of art and well-known to Maxie. How fitting, Dez thought. And what a delicious coincidence. Or was it fate? James Lawrence King didn’t know that he had bought William Hart’s daughter’s painting. He didn’t know that William Hart had suggested the playhouse reopen with
The Tempest
.

Maxie sold each canvas for five hundred dollars and paid Dez half. She would sell the rest eventually, she said, and did:
Othello
in May,
Lear
and
Macbeth
two weeks later, and the dark
Hamlet
to a buyer in July.

It was an odd feeling to enjoy such substantial success and not be able to lay claim to it, but Maxie’s plan worked. Without knowing anything about the artist, focus turned to the art. A flurry of excitement stirred around D. H. Spaulding as Dez continued to work at the
Standard
, continued to paint at the League, and continued to grow her savings account. With each sale, with each deposit, she relaxed a bit more. Though she was more nervous about putting her earnings into a bank than she had been in Cascade, the government had been federally insuring deposits since 1933 and she figured a hopefully solid government had to be safer than a strongbox under a bed in a New York City flat.

It always surprised Dez that people did not see the obvious, did not realize that Dez Hart’s work was D.H.’s. Although she tended to use her League classes for practice and experimentation and paint her “real work” in her own apartment, the truth was that the work was not completely different. The assumption that D.H. was a man made people blind to what was right in front of them.

Between her job, her classes at the League, her painting at home, and her budding social life, calendar pages started to flip more quickly: November, December, January. Occasionally, she would join people for drinks after class; she even dated someone a few times, a pleasant enough editor for the
New York Herald Tribune
. But mainly she went home; she worked.

There was news from Massachusetts: in April, Asa moved to Belchertown, to 14 Elm Street, and Attorney Peterson sent a bulging packet containing the wording of the preliminary divorce agreement. Mr. Washburn sent Joe and Nancy back to Cascade to report on the June Farewell Ball. Dez pored over Joe’s pictures. Cascade had become a bulldozed swath of bowl-shaped acres, ringed by shrubby watershed. The few remaining buildings—the hotel, Town Hall, the train station—stood
exposed and naked amid the dirt. They looked like early photographs she had seen of New York in the 1870s. There was that same raw, new look to the landscape. The water authority’s administration offices were housed in the golf course’s fancy clubhouse, which, being located on watershed land, would be the only building allowed to stay intact.