Cascade (5 page)

Outside Stein’s, standing under the
Mens Ladies and Children’s Wear
sign, Abby stood with her hands on her hips, looking over the display window—three wooden torsos clad in sensible shirtwaists. “I just can’t believe this is Cascade. Rudolph Valentino came here! And Lionel Barrymore.”

“There’s a new golf course opening. Everyone thinks that’s a sign that good times are coming again.” Dr. Proulx and two Boston men, a pair of executives and friends of the Boston mayor—men one would think knew a safe investment when they saw one—had bought the Clark estate on Route 13, near Whistling Falls. Since last year, workmen had been turning the 165 acres into a golf course, the fieldstone mansion into a swank clubhouse. Dr. Proulx’s partners were men known for turning straw to gold, even in these times—especially in these times. They were building while building was cheap, biding their time.

But Abby’s glazed eyes were back. She looked down Main Street, at the Brilliant Lunch Bar, the Handy Grocery, the Criterion Theater, and the Endicott Bank, which cautiously reopened after Roosevelt passed the Emergency Banking Act two years ago. “Why, it’s just a small town.”

It was. And now Dez felt its smallness, its loss of its old glamour. Even the historic Round Church, always marveled at by visitors, considered so quaint, simply looked like a round white building with a belfry on top.

At the end of Main Street, they crossed over Lake Street and paused on the bridge that spanned the Cascade dam. Water rushed down the ten-foot drop, drowning out their voices with the obliterating sound that had, since childhood, filled Dez with a fierce mingling of longing and affirmation. The thundering was like the word
yes,
like the word
go
, like staying awake all night in a city bright with electric light. The past few months, walking to town or back home again, the falls had been a kind of secret friend, reminding her, in a strange way, that life was still going on outside Cascade, that it would always go on. But now that she really thought about it, what good did that knowledge do her? She had been passive, waiting and hoping things would change.

Up River Road, past the closed-up summer homes with their chipped columns and falling slate, red auction flags waving in the breeze, she listened as Abby talked about old friends. Nelly Lodge married that boy from Yale, and no, no one from school was invited. Their history instructor, James Whittaker, was a curator in Washington now. “At the National Gallery, I think. Remember what a fuss he made over you, being William Hart’s daughter? He always went on and on about Cascade. If he could see it now.”

Had Abby always been so flip? Or was Dez herself the one who seemed different now that she was away from the crowd? She looked down into the churning foam streaming from the dam. All her life, she had been part of boisterous groups of girls without ever being very boisterous herself. Much of what had been her identity were aspects that had nothing, really, to do with who she was. Moneyed. Well-traveled. Daughter of a man with some renown. You took all that away and what did you have?

She considered. You had a person who’d known, ever since she could hold a pencil, that she had an innate ability to draw, and who wanted to do nothing else. That’s what you had.

The Spaulding home was a solid white farmhouse, the last house on River Road before acres of forest formed Pine Point, the craggy isthmus near Whistling Falls. It was the only inhabited home on River Road. Stiff brown grass was finally giving way to green. On the river, fog rose off the last of the ice remnants and moved in wisps around the birch grove. How silent it was, how silent it always was! There were bird sounds, water sounds. Sometimes the rustling of dry leaves. Sometimes rain. Once or twice an hour, trains rumbled across the river.

“Asa inherited this house after his mother died, which was two years ago,” Dez said, holding the back door open for Abby. “But I still haven’t lost the sense that I’m living in someone else’s space.”

Inside, Abby shook her head at the sight of the parlor, dark and full of wood and china bric-a-brac. “Oh, toots. It’s awful! Why don’t you throw it all out?” Along the west wall sat three claret-colored velvet stools that looked like kneelers in a Catholic confessional. Abby gave one a kick. “What the hell are these?”

A jumble that had belonged to Mrs. Spaulding. “Asa’s one of those people who really doesn’t like change,” Dez said. “But I have to say he was generous about this.” She opened the door to the studio, as bright as the parlor was dark. “It’s got the steadiest light in the house.”

Abby stepped inside, her eyes taking the measure of the workspace—the three easels and the long table cluttered with stretching supplies, jars of linseed and poppy oils, tins of paints and china plates, brushes, badger tools. The wooden shelves that bowed with the weight of books and photographs, and supported the drying racks below.

One easel contained a finished portrait of two sisters from Worcester, nieces of the New York Pullmans. A rare commission she had managed to snag, Dez said, although whether she would ever collect payment was another story. Twice, the mother had called in to pick it up, but money was tight, even for people who had plenty of it. The mother wanted to be
sure the portrait was exactly right, and she was picky. First, she said that the color of Marjorie’s dress wasn’t quite right, that in real life the velvet was a much darker green. And then the younger girl decided she wanted her doll painted into the portrait.

Abby gave the two sisters a long look. “I can tell exactly what kinds of girls these are; you’ve managed to capture that, haven’t you? They’re spoiled, but they’re not bad girls, are they?” She turned her attention to the other, new canvas: the squared-off view of grass. Seeing it anew, with fresh eyes, Dez’s enthusiasm for it sank a bit. It wasn’t quite right. The blades of grass needed to challenge the canvas’s small size, appear to
spill
out of the boundaries. They weren’t quite tall enough. Something.

It was an awful feeling—discontent. Especially when it happened in the middle of a social time. Because all you wanted to do was get back to work and try to make it right, but you couldn’t. You had to put it from your mind. Either that, or become some kind of eccentric who did whatever she wanted, regardless of who was around, and then what kind of life did you have?

“I remember this,” Abby said, reaching for a small framed portrait of Dez. “Miss Farrell did this during demonstration. She liked you.”

“I liked her.” And she liked that depiction of herself, the mix of chrome red and cadmium yellow wax crayon for hair forced somewhat unsuccessfully into the wavy style everyone else had worn so effortlessly. Harsh black strokes illustrated the rest: her lean body, her too-broad nose, her way of biting her lower lip as she worked, bent forward from the waist.

“She was a tough old bird.” Abby knelt down and looked through the drying racks. She pulled out the low-key study of their old home that Dez painted when Jacob suggested she attempt to paint the senses. What are your favorite smells? he had asked.
Wood smoke in November
,
wind that is full of rain. A busy kitchen.

“I like this.”

Dez had used a narrow color range and soft-focus effects to convey the moody atmosphere of rain and twilight on the common, working at
eliminating detail—trying instead to
distill
, to convey tone by letting the dark colors impose some compositional authority on the softer hues.

“You want to look and look,” Abby said. “I’m not sure why.”

“I know when my paintings are right,” Dez admitted, even though she knew she risked sounding silly, or full of herself, “when I can look at them and ache with a kind of wonderful memory I can’t quite place.”

“I know what you mean.” Abby studied it again before sliding it back into its rack. “Oh, I like this, too!” She pulled out one of the abstracted drowning studies that Dez had turned into a narrow, claustrophobia-inducing painting. “And this!”
Spanish Flu, 1918,
a small, square study of sturdy Rose, head bent, tending to Dez’s mother and brother. The three figures were dark and shadowy, much like her memory of that time, the flu itself a static of eerie yellow air. A burst of vermilion, off-center, suggested a bedside spray of roses.

“Are you doing this kind of thing all the time? Such range. Good work, my dear.”

“I’m trying. I suppose I’d like more portrait work, to bring in money, but—maybe I’m lucky times are so hard, and I live where I do. If I had nothing but portraits to do, I might get too caught up in them.”

“We should all be so lucky.”

“I mean it.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I’m afraid I’d find them too safe, too much of an easy trade for myself, especially now that I’m a wife.”

Abby smiled with approval. “Right. You’d be able to keep yourself so busy you wouldn’t have time to dig into what you want to say, and because you were so busy, you’d fool yourself into thinking you were getting an awful lot done.”

“Exactly.” Here was the Abby she had missed.

“So this is it,” Abby said, lifting down Portia’s casket to inspect it, to turn it over in her hands and hold it to her ear and shake it. “Doesn’t it drive you mad? I’d want to peek.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t think I can wait. But it’s doing what
he meant it to do—remind me I have to reopen someday. And keep painting these portraits when I can get the work. Save what I can.”

In the kitchen, Dez perked coffee and sliced the last of the corned ham for sandwiches. She set down their two plates, and Abby regarded her solemnly, red-lacquered fingertips poised on the coffee mug.

“So what happened?” she asked, one hand gesturing to include everything, her dark eyes too scrutinizing. “You were the one who won the Cabot Prize. You got that write-up in the
Evening Transcript
! You’re doing some wonderful painting but it doesn’t look like you’re doing a whole lot of it.”

“I work every morning. And those red fingernails don’t look like you do much painting yourself.”

“We’re talking about you. You always talked about Cascade this, Cascade that. And it’s obvious Cascade is old news now—”

“It’s different in summer. Or it was. And it will be again.” She wanted it so desperately: the theater lobby filled, on play nights, with New York summer people. Her paintings, framed and on display. That was her only realistic chance of ever achieving any notice again. “When the summer people come back—”

“Oh, honey.” Abby threw her hands into her lap and made her face a squish of “let’s be frank” compassion. “I don’t think they’re coming back. Even if they don’t build that reservoir, you know what? The place to be will be somewhere new. I can see that now, now that I’m here.”

“That’s not necessarily true.”

“It’s the way it always happens. Look—magazines are full of stories about how people are driving. Cars. More and more. All these roads and bridges Roosevelt’s going to build all over the country? Vacationers might never come back here. And I hear that Lenox is nicer, quite honestly.”

Cascadians liked to scoff at suggestions that Lenox could overtake Cascade in general popularity, but Lenox had a similar cultural bent and
long history of moneyed vacationers. Lenox, once known as the “inland Newport,” peppered with palatial “cottages,” had clear lakes and nearby mountains, and easier travel routes from New York and Connecticut.