Cascade (8 page)

“Come on, Dez.” His eyes asked, why was she arguing? He
saw
that
she had been made uncomfortable by the drawing, too, by the fact that it was so clearly meant to shock. “You don’t have to ask. Taste.”

“Whose taste?”

“Everyone’s. People’s. Jeez, Dez.” He wanted her to let him off the hook. He still had deliveries to make, plus evening hours to put in at the drugstore. Conversation at their table was usually a simple review of the events of the day. “That thing she drew—it was degenerate.
In my opinion
.”

He held the afternoon newspaper high to retreat behind its pages. The front-page headline was blacker, deeper than normal.
STORM CLOUDS GATHERING IN EUROPE
, and she was reminded of the strained, anxious times they lived in.
Be grateful for what you have. Didn’t you just decide to make the best of things?

She forced her voice into a gentler register. “Dinner’s ready,” she said, lifting their plates and cocking her head for him to follow.

In the studio, he stopped short at the scene she had set. “What’s all this?” His eyes going straight to her belly.

Of course. When a normal woman found out she was expecting, she made a special dinner to announce it.

“Asa, no. It’s not that.”

“But—” He looked around, at the silver, the apple butter, the painting on the easel, before appealing to her with eyes that had turned cloudy. “But you’ve made everything so special.”

“I don’t have news, Asa. Not that kind of news.”

“Oh.” He pushed at the wire rims of his spectacles, then sat down and touched the sides of his plate, a gesture that made her feel guilty. Who did he have in the world, besides his brother, Silas, anymore? He wanted children, roots of his own, a family.

He looked up and gave her a bucking-up sort of smile. “What, then?”

“I just thought we’d have a change. Do something other than eat our supper in exactly the same way every night.”

“I see.” He hid his disappointment. He praised the cabbage rolls, praised the chops. “Juicy.” She looked down at her plate to suppress the irrational shudder that the word
juicy
provoked in her.

From the radio came the sound of an audience clapping. There was a pause, the murmuring of a voice introducing the next song, then “Temptation” tinkling into the room:
You came, I was alone, I should have known you were temptation
.

She jumped up. This song always reminded her of Jacob. It made her feel wild and full of crazy longing that was pointless and stupid and wrong. “Don’t you love this song?” She positioned herself behind Asa and rested her hands on his shoulders. She closed her eyes to sway to the melody. She wanted to be in love with her husband. She pulled him to his feet, making him lead her around the narrow space between the table and the wall, putting his hands to her hips so they would rest there. She looked up into his face, and saw that even as he was baffled by her, he was still crazy for her, and wasn’t that a lucky thing?
Let him be enough
, she thought, relaxing against him, moving with the music, until he closed his mouth down over hers and then it was there—the knowledge—too late, that all this, of course, would lead to him wanting to go upstairs, and her temperature had spiked four days ago. Unsafe, unsafe.

He let go. He took a few steps backward and studied her for a few moments. “What is going on, Dez?”

Nothing.
I’m just a crazy person.
“Nothing.”

“That’s right, nothing.” He composed himself before speaking, obviously trying to be nice, trying to be reasonable. “Dez, we’ve been married six months and nothing is happening and you don’t seem to want anything to happen.”

Why not tell the truth, she realized? Why not just tell him? “I’m not ready for babies, Asa, I’m just not. And I’ve been talking to Lucy Winters.” Lucy, who had delivered three children in just under three years and was beside herself. “There’s a doctor in Worcester where I can get fitted for a diaphragm.”

He flushed at her use of the word. “Excuse me?”

“It will help us wait until the time is right.”

“Why would we want to wait?”

“Why are
you
in such a rush for a baby?”

The question took him by surprise. He opened his mouth then closed it again. But she could think of a dozen reasons. Because an immediate pregnancy said a lot about a man’s virility. Because he just plain wanted one. Because maybe, unconsciously, he feared she would indeed leave, like Abby had suggested. A child would tie her to him forever, they both knew that.

“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.

A
sa 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
.