“We’re getting old,” he said. “I’m thirty-three. I don’t think it’s smart to wait. When my mother died, she died worrying about me, worried that I was wasting my time waiting around for you.”
Dez looked away. “That sounds so bitter.”
“Well, you were always breezing in and out of town, and she was always reminding me that my uncle Nat and his wife waited too long, and then, when they tried, it was too late. And I think for the number of times we’ve done it—” He flushed again. “For the number of times, something should have happened. I think something’s wrong. I think you need to see Dr. Proulx.”
“It’s common for first children to take their time coming, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“There’s nothing wrong, Asa.”
The telephone rang, two quick jangling rings. Neither of them moved to get it.
It rang again.
She listened to his footsteps across the carpet, the hallway, the linoleum, the persistent double jangle, his hello.
Zeke, it sounded like he was talking to Zeke.
A rainy breeze blew in through the window and she turned to it, wanting to turn herself into it, into something that could float out a window. The hard rain had turned misty, a veil thrown over the night. Hairline cracks of lightning etched the sky, one after another like new constellations until one turned rigid and blasted bright for a full few seconds. The room lit up, catching the gleam and luster of Portia’s casket, high on its shelf. A child will make a difference in your life.
“That’s the truth,” she said aloud. And thunder dropped like a boulder in reply. It shook the house, the plates on the table, it turned the radio to static. She backed reflexively into the doorway, looking around as if she might see a ghost. Dad? Was this some kind of sign? That her deception was wrong, her glass thermometer, hidden in her bedside drawer, was wrong?
Of course it was.
And there was her answer: the least she could do was be honest, tell him the truth, tell him there was nothing wrong, that she had been keeping charts. He would simply have to accept that she wasn’t ready, give her a few months.
She walked into the kitchen with determination, with a cleansed and contented conscience. When the end of September came, when Jacob left, life would be grim enough. She would revisit the idea of a baby in the fall.
6
Asa was standing by the telephone box, the receiver still in his hand, looking at it with disbelief.
“That was Zeke,” he said. “He said it’s official. The legislature has passed the bill, it’ll be in the Boston papers tomorrow.”
It took a moment for Dez to comprehend the news, to grasp it and grasp at straws at the same time. “The project could still stall.”
“No, they’re pushing on. For some reason, it’s all speeding up. Now they’re on course to make a decision on which valley, us or Whistling Falls. Zeke’s called a special town meeting for next Wednesday.”
He was dazed-looking, but only in the way of someone who was quickly taking stock of his situation. “Why did I let people doubt me? We’ve been waiting around for months, and haven’t I been saying right from the start that we should have been fighting this thing so that Cascade would never end up as an option like this? Wasn’t that my instinct?” In January, Asa had tried to organize a protest trip to the State House, but people like Zeke and Dr. Proulx had urged him not to stir up trouble. People in general were having a hard enough time as it was, they said. The threat would blow over; it had before.
“You can’t blame yourself. We all hoped this was going to just go away.”
“Well,” he said, “we stopped them in ’29, we’ll just have to stop them again.”
“But—” Or maybe he didn’t know. “You do know the real story of why they pulled out of Cascade last time?”
He looked up, suspicion in his eyes—he had heard the rumors, had suspected there was a real story, known only by certain people. “Tell me,” he said.
“Well, you remember Richard Harcourt.” In the early twenties, Richard Harcourt, a vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, built one of the Greek Revivals on River Road. His wife and children used to spend their summers in Cascade; Harcourt would train up from Manhattan on weekends. He was one of the Cascade Playhouse’s biggest patrons, good for large donations and dozens of tickets. Now he was in prison.
“Harcourt put in a quiet word to the governor back when the water commission was doing that second round of surveys and recommendations,” she said. “He got the state to back off Cascade. He didn’t want his summer place destroyed.”
Asa raised his eyebrows with amusement, with relief. “Oh, come on. I heard those rumors, but one person’s word wouldn’t have been enough to squelch a major plan like that.”
“It’s true.” Her father had been privy to all of it. “Governor Fuller was an arts patron. He came to a performance here more than once. He cared about that sort of thing. I happen to know he owns a Renoir and a Boccaccino. And of course at the time no one thought it made a lot of sense to build so far from Boston.”
“It still doesn’t.”
“No.” But it was kind of like death after a long illness. This uncertainty that had been hanging over their heads like an ax; well, it would be a relief, in a way, to finally know, one way or the other. If the state did choose Cascade, the fight could start in earnest. Either that, or—or what? They could accept the inevitable? No.
“They’ll take Whistling Falls, Asa. It simply makes more sense.”
“Our elevations are lower,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Our water levels higher. Most of Cascade borders the river. Our valley is a more natural bowl shape. Except for that chunk on the east, and I bet they’d take just a bit of Whistling Falls to fill it all out. I bet they would. The site work’s done, too. All those surveys they did in the twenties. Once they make their decision it won’t take long for them to get down to work.”
He was too agitated to sit with the coffee he normally enjoyed after dinner. He lifted his coat, still slick and wet, off the coat rack and opened the back door. The rain had stopped and the night air was fresh with the smell of earth and river water. He stepped out onto the porch and raised his arms, an appeal to the heavens. “It’s impossible. They simply can’t do this!”
The yard was cluttered with dead branches. Among the debris was a Baltimore oriole’s socklike nest at the bottom of the steps. Asa crouched down to pick it up and set it on the porch railing.
“That same family of orioles has come back to that nest year after year,” he said grimly.
“I hope it’s not a sign—”
“Oh, hush!” He said it so harshly she felt slapped. He’d never spoken to her like that. But he didn’t apologize, just started across the lawn, then turned to shoot her a savage look. “What’s the attraction to people like that Abby person, anyway? Why don’t you socialize with the women in town?”
“Well, I—”
“What’s wrong with Lil Montgomery?”
“Well, she—” Asa knew she had gone to boarding schools, for goodness sake, that the local girls were nice enough, but they had grown up with Dez Hart out of sight, out of mind. And now they were all busy with babies.
“I want children and I want Dr. Proulx’s opinion why they’re not coming, damn it. I’m entitled to that! I’m a little sick of my friends looking at me like—The house a disaster.” His voice rose. “My wife’s only friend the traveling Jew-man.”
Dez went still. Asa had never seemed to notice Jacob, never mind insult him. “The house is not a disaster” was all she could manage to say.
He didn’t respond, didn’t look back, just strode across the lawn, got into the Buick, and skidded away as if it were her fault the state wanted to drown them all.
She stood in the doorway long after the sounds of the car had faded. Did people know about her friendship with Jacob? Were they talking about it? Laughing? It gave her a pang to know that people
would. As a child, she had once referred to old Mr. Solomon as the Jew-man, like she had heard people do. Her father had used the opportunity to pull out The Merchant of Venice. He’d condensed and clarified, and even though Dez was only eight, she’d followed the gist of the story. She had imagined the pound of flesh as something neat and square, wrapped in paper and tied with twine, like lard, and was delighted with Portia’s shattering of that image, delighted with Portia’s cleverness. She wanted to know why her father hadn’t named her Portia instead of clumsy old, silly-sounding Desdemona, but he said only that her mother hadn’t liked the name and reread Shylock’s speech again, intent on driving home his point. If you prick us, he read, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? Her ears pricked up at the word revenge, thinking that her father was preparing her for some wonderful act of retribution that Mr. Solomon would perpetrate on Cascade. None came, of course. Mr. Solomon took no offense; the townspeople meant none. Innocents all, her father used to say, but Dez, innocence is the excuse of the ignorant.
She was in bed when she heard the car pull into the driveway, the back door opening, the sound of rustling downstairs. She opened her bedside drawer and gazed down at the thermometer, closing her thumb and forefinger around the cool glass. How easy it would be to snap it, to release the puddle of mercury, to say, yes, Asa, I’m ready for all that you want. But she shut the drawer and shut her eyes, slid under the sheets, and pretended to sleep until he came in and turned out the light and pretended to sleep, too.
She woke to morning sun and the scent of soap, to the breeze of his body standing over her. He sat down on the edge of the bed; he took her hand. The pads of his fingers were rough where they made contact with the stone pestle day after day.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have taken my frustrations out on you.”
Thanks, she started to say.
“But here’s the thing,” he said. “I think it might be best if Jacob Solomon didn’t come here anymore.”
She moved to sit up, to look him clearly in the face. “Asa, we’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I didn’t say you had.”
What, then? “Has someone said something?”
“I’m saying something, saying I don’t think it’s the best idea for my wife to be alone with a man who shares her interests. It’s a recipe for disaster, and I think I’ve had my head in the sand about it.”
“But it’s our work we have in common. He’s just a friend.”
His eyes were steady. “I’m not stupid, Dez.”
No, he wasn’t. But neither was she, and she forced herself to hold his gaze, to show her innocence. She’d been careful. She hadn’t done a thing wrong and there was no reason why she should have to give up her friendship. “You can think what you like but you’re wrong. And he’ll be gone soon enough anyway.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want him here.” He got to his feet. “And that’s the end of the matter.”
“But he’s coming today. What am I supposed to say?”
“Say anything. Tell him—tell him you want to meet in town from now on. Maybe you could start something, Art Hour or something. Ask Betty if you can run it at the library. That’s it. Get other people involved—school kids—send some kind of message to the state, do up some posters maybe.” He looked to her for approval, pleased with the idea. “Now, there’s a way you can help. We’ve got to fight this any way we can. I’ve actually decided to band a few people together to figure out a way to fight this. The men in this town who won’t buckle under.”
And then he was gone, turned on his heels, down the stairs, and out the door. And like echo was the memory of Abby’s voice: Asa’s house. Asa’s money. He even has your playhouse.
7
She heard Jacob’s knock vaguely, as if from under water. Then again, louder. “In the studio,” she called, rubbing paint from her fingers with an oily rag, rehearsing what to say. Asa’s asked me to ask you not to come here anymore. Asa’s starting to get concerned about the time we’re spending together. It all sounded so awkward; it would force them to imagine an intimacy that would embarrass them both.
And then there he was, standing in the doorway, hat in his hands. “Hello.”
“Hello.” It was always like this to start: quiet, cordial, eyes connecting. It was as if they acknowledged something they couldn’t put into words or act on, then moved forward with civility, as modern people, a man and woman who could simply be friends.
Or maybe she imagined all that.
In any case, they were easy with each other. She stepped away to reveal her canvas, to ask what he thought. And as he studied the new painting, she, with the fresh perspective that even a few minutes could give, saw how the light would need to fall much more significantly on that foremost blade of grass. The viewer’s eye needed to be drawn to that blade, forced to reflect on how alike it was to all the others, while still uniquely itself. She needed to add something, a drop of dew perhaps, glistening and fat.
“If you add some aureolin yellow to the undersides of that blade, some flake white to the tip, just there,” he said, pointing, “you’ll get the intensity you’re after. Without the muddiness.” He tipped his head as if to say, Go on.
She did what he suggested and the look of the blade changed—it became more dimensional, more emphatic, more what she was after. “That’s it! I want the viewer to first look and see ‘grass,’ and then look closer and mull on the fact that this blade—here—is different. And to wonder why. But I have to make it stand out even more, don’t you think? I thought of adding dew, and one of my thumbnails had the river as backdrop, but I have such a hard time with water.” She gestured to the west window, with its view to the river as it curved sharply toward town. River water was ever-changing and now the weather had been mild enough that it was flowing freely, the last specks of winter ice evaporated.
“Water’s hard.” The sun peeked out and a patch of river briefly sparkled white, as if to make his point. “And there’s no ‘right way,’ of course. But what you want to do is look for its different colors,” he said. “Differentiate them. There’s the color of the sun’s reflection, first of all, which will hit at sharper angles than the color of the sky’s reflection, or the clouds’. You ask yourself, is the water transparent? Here, we’re too far away to worry about whether we can see the bottom, but if we were closer, it would affect the color we chose. You ask yourself, what color are the shadows? Because each ripple casts its own distinct shadow.”
How easily he made suggestions, articulated techniques. But he shrugged as if it were nothing. “Lincoln taught me about water.”
“The image I have of Lincoln Bell is so far removed from ‘patient teacher.’” No one had known Lincoln Bell, never mind studied with him, but Jacob’s father had somehow finagled an agreement, driving his son down two hours of dirt roads and at least two flat tires a trip to Lincoln Bell’s Connecticut studio once a week, from the time he was sixteen until he went down to New York in 1926.
“Oh, he wasn’t nearly so ornery as the public believed.” He went quiet, almost somber, and she wondered if bringing up Lincoln Bell had somehow been a mistake. “But people often want to believe the worst of people, don’t they?”
“I suppose they do,” she said uncertainly.
He looked away with an attempt at a smile. “Sorry. It’s just that we got some bad news from my cousin Brieghel today.”
Jacob never talked about Berlin—he had plenty of stories about the print shop in Amsterdam, and Spain, which he’d loved, and London, where he had stopped to earn traveling money. But about Berlin, where he’d spent months with Brieghel and his wife, he’d said almost nothing at all.
“What news?”
He shook his head as if he’d rather not elaborate, and Dez’s mind turned to the latest stories coming out of Germany, the kinds of stories you read sidelong in the newspaper, sliding away from the wor
ds even as you took them in, telling yourself that things couldn’t really be as bad as they were made out to be.
“So everyone’s talking about the big meeting next week,” he said.
“There’s a very good chance they’ll take Whistling Falls, but Jacob, is your cousin all right?”
He chewed his upper lip, as if deciding whether to speak. Then he said, “His wife wants to leave. She thinks they should get to England while the getting is good.”
“It’s really that bad? Will they go?”
“He’s going to give it a few more months, through the summer, hope for the best. In the meantime, try to put money aside. That shop is everything to them.”
“You must worry.”
“He doesn’t think it can go much further. I guess a lot of people don’t. They think the Nazis are preposterous, and deluded if they think they can get away with all this. I was there during that boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, and it was all very unpleasant but no one really took it seriously.”
Still. “It must have been terrible,” she said quietly.
His face seemed to shadow. Dez would one day try to sketch that shadow—it was a certain lowering of his eyelids, a setting of his lips.
He walked over to the window, put his hands in his pockets, and looked out for a few moments. Then he spun around with an air of decisiveness. “Let’s talk of pleasant things,” he said. “Did your friend end up coming?”
“She did, and I was thinking this morning that it seems like more than just yesterday that she was here.” When weather changed abruptly, transitioning to another season within hours, time felt altered. Abby arrived during what still felt like winter, and then in a matter of hours, spring had arrived with warm wind and rainstorms. Even now, the room was darkening with another spring storm.
“I’m a bit concerned about her. She doesn’t have a job to go to, doesn’t have any money.”
“Brave of her. Or foolish.”
“That’s what I thought. Although, it almost seemed like she was hiding something. I don’t know.”
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