Cascade (44 page)

In July, the playhouse moved to its new plot of land in Lenox. She wasn’t there for the move, but James Lawrence King sent a picture, via his secretary, to assure her it survived the trip. She tucked the picture into a corner of her easel. In it, the playhouse was grainy and forlorn, transplanted onto the grassy stretch of Lenox land. The picture was cropped; she could not see the tall pines that had looked so majestic in earlier photographs. Still, the playhouse was safe and that was what mattered.

That photograph witnessed many late nights and early mornings of effort. In later years, the mid- to late thirties would be seen as D. H. Spaulding’s most productive period. Maxie never wanted any of Dez’s work from the League, but frequently, she took the canvases D.H. painted alone, at home. Dez knew it wasn’t just the fact of D. H. Spaulding that kept Maxie from buying her League studies. She knew she painted differently when she was alone, with more color and more risk.

D. H. Spaulding acquired a certain mystique. It was rumored that he lived on a bee farm on Long Island, that he lived on a houseboat on the Seine, moored near Nôtre Dame, that he was really England’s Paul Sandler, producing under a type of painterly pen name. Maxie, with her closed-mouth allusions, fed the speculation, and instructed Dez to conceal her home pieces from everyone else, but it all made Dez nervous. Increasingly, she began to want to lay claim to her efforts, but the kind of buildup she was getting was bound to disappoint people if her real identity was revealed. It wouldn’t matter whether she was unveiled as Leonardo reincarnated or as some gifted love child of Pablo Picasso’s, the mere fact of mystery uncovered always brought with it a sense of
disappointment, of deflation. The fact that she was a woman would make the disillusionment total.

But the mystique grew, and every month or so, to the point where it became a running joke, Maxie asked for
The Black Veil
. She could sell it in a minute; Dez would be set for a good long time. But Dez always said no, and it sat in her apartment, hidden in the closet with her other work, for three years—three years during which she never once ran into Jacob.

For a long time she expected that she would inevitably encounter him. She knew, through Amy Cantor, that he did indeed become a member of the Easel Project. She also knew that, as a member of that project, he could paint wherever he liked and that most artists chose to work at home or in their own studios. Still, she expected she would run into him sometime. New York was a big city, but it wasn’t that big. She braced for the possibility that she might even see him when he was with his wife and baby, but months passed, then a year, two years, and when she did not ever glimpse him, she grew first bitter, then sad, and then, finally, resigned. In that resigned state, she could think of him with distance, with bemusement even, until some small, beautiful thing, a reflection on a rainy pavement, or the sound of jazz from one of the clubs on Columbus, would pierce her, and remind her of what she still missed.

S
he hoped Jacob would see it. When
The Black Veil
was so misunderstood, and when, ironically, that misunderstanding brought her such acclaim, such incredible, instant fame, the primary reason she was elated by the publicity was that she wanted Jacob to know that with that painting she was telling the truth and that she had told it for him.

She finally decided to show it in the fall of 1939. The previous June, her divorce was made final at last. She returned to Massachusetts to meet with Asa in a Springfield court, to sign the documents that would dissolve their marriage. Asa, embarrassed to be standing in front of a judge in a divorce case, was cordial to Dez, but only that. Four years had passed since the day she boarded the train at Cascade Station; he’d had a lot of time to reflect. His eyes had faint lines around the corners; he wore a buttoned-up cardigan sweater under his suit. He seemed to have become a contented bachelor, and as they stood side by side in front of the judge, she doubted that he would marry again.

Afterward, she traveled to Cascade by herself. The
Standard
continued the project with quarterly progress reports, but used Joe Katz’s stark
photographs and his wife, Nancy’s reporting exclusively. There had been no need for Dez’s interpretive paintings since
The Farewell Ball
in the summer of 1936.

Dez was eager to see the area now that the reservoir was complete. Enough time had passed that all the slow, transitional destruction/construction was done. The reservoir had even been dedicated, and formally named the Rappahannock, an Indian word for “swift rising river.”

She traveled from Springfield to Bath and registered at the Bath River Hotel, where she hired a driver to take her out to the Rappahannock. The driver was a quiet old man who kept his cap pulled down over his forehead and hummed, but otherwise didn’t say a word. He drove Dez the ten miles on leafy, tree-lined Route 13 to the reservoir, slowing down when they got to fenced-off land with signs, at intervals, that read
Massachusetts Water Authority
. At one point, Dez guessed that they were in the area of what had been the Poplar Street turnoff, but as soon as they passed through a set of iron gates, she lost her bearings. They were on a paved road through what might have been a grassy meadow, or maybe the grassy meadow had developed after the houses and trees came down. The road led straight to a small circular rotary that offered a choice: left or right. Ahead lay the great basin, a large expanse of what looked, now, like a half-filled lake. “Stop,” she said. “Please. I want to get out.”

The basin was vast, a bowl thirty-six square miles in size, ringed by watershed land. The surrounding land still looked scarred, disturbed, unnatural. The reservoir was about a quarter way full, slowly rising as the river, rainwater, and melting winter snow filled it year after year. Dez had read that it would take eight or nine years to fill the Rappahannock to capacity.

She peered down the road on either side of the rotary, looking for landmarks, but there were none. Back in the car, she instructed the driver to take a left, a blind choice. About a quarter mile down the road, they came to a parking lot and building—the former golf-course clubhouse. The ornate stone structure now bore a plaque identifying it as the water
authority’s administration office. That meant that the common, the falls, River Road, and all of it must have been down past the rotary in the other direction. They headed back and this time the road began to climb a curving hill. At the summit, a semicircular parking area allowed cars to stop and look out over the reservoir. A wooden sign read
Cascade Lookout
. Cascade Lookout, it seemed, was the ridge that once sat high above Pine Point, and it offered a spectacular view. Where once the river below flowed in from the northeast and curved around in a swooping arc toward town, now the water spread out like a vast lake.

Hard to fathom that it was the same space. The same spot of earth.

The car door opened and the driver got out to join her in looking out over the basin. “I’m guessing you used to live here.”

“I did. We lived on the common, then I moved a little bit out, just right about there, when I got married.” She pointed down to the left, to where the house on River Road must have stood. Asa’s mother’s Catholic kneelers, she suddenly remembered. What had become of them? Probably packed and moved to Belchertown.

“I bring a lot of people out here. Those postcards they did made this place kind of famous. People always want to come out and have a look.”

They drove back down the hill and stopped where Dez thought the Cascade Falls used to roar and spray. Sure enough, off to the left, a road led in toward the reservoir, toward what must have been the town center, the paved roads still in place. She got out and followed the road. Strange to think it was the same pavement she had walked so many times, yet when she looked left or right or straight ahead, nothing—
nothing
—was familiar. Not a single shrub or stone. She followed the road until it ended at the water, and she could only faintly see the drowned asphalt. The town center had sat at a low elevation, so they hadn’t had to do any digging here. And because the water levels were still low, the basin was shallow, the submerged network of paved roads still visible. Everything else had been painstakingly removed—every building, streetlamp, mailbox, fence.

Near the edge of the basin, she realized she was walking parallel to what must have been Elm Street, which had led to Chestnut Street, to the hotel and to the playhouse. Where buildings were razed, large cellar holes quickly filled with water. In the distance, something black, like a stick or pole, seemed to float upright under the water. At first, she couldn’t make it out. Then she realized it was the old iron hitching post, still standing in front of the cellar hole where the Cascade Hotel had stood. Why had they left that? Surely not a mistake. The decision of someone who couldn’t stand to totally obliterate what had once been a civilization? She could imagine so, because it was dizzying to remember the hotel in that very spot, to visualize herself as a ten-year-old, a twenty-year-old, walking in a place that had seemed so permanent and had proven to be anything but. Beside it, too far away to really see, would be the playhouse’s flooded cellar hole. She stared in the direction of the hole, trying to imagine, to re-create the past, to do some kind of justice to it, to believe that the past could somehow be kept alive.

She supposed it could—through art. The past lived through a culture’s art. Her postcards documented surface Cascade, a Cascade that should be remembered, yes, but
The Black Veil
recorded an episode that also needed to be remembered. She couldn’t let it go to a private collection, but she could show it, send it out into the world. Perhaps now that was the only way Jacob would ever see it.

When she returned to New York, she delivered it to Maxie.

D
ez had already found that with art, with the whole idea of “career,” that getting what you wanted was satisfying only on one level. It was the same sort of satisfaction you might feel when you’d made a list for your busy day, and at day’s end, ticked off each accomplishment. For example, perhaps you’d longed for, dreamed of winning, the Huntington Prize, had imagined how it would feel, but when you had actually won the Huntington Prize, you were already back at your easel, trying for something else.

Real satisfaction came when inspiration and effort magically took flight at the easel—the satisfaction that had come the submerged week of painting that she still remembered with cocoonlike warmth. Did she feel different when she showed
The Black Veil
at the New New York Gallery and it won the Huntington Prize? When the Whitney purchased it? Not really. And that was the thing about art, about any artistic endeavor where you gathered all the energy and emotion that surrounded you and tried to paint it, write it, sing it. It was never quite enough. There was always the impulse to try for better, for purer.

It was just coincidence—a coincidence Dez never noticed—that the shape of Cascade resembled the shape of the European continent, that the river and basin formed the shape of the state of Germany.

Maxie showed it in September of 1939, just after Britain and France declared war on Germany. The critics started a buzz about it, then George Biddle, the friend of President Roosevelt who conceived the W.P.A., saw it, and all of a sudden
The Black Veil
was being interpreted as an anti-Nazi painting. The editor of
Life
magazine, Henry Luce, a major proponent of U.S. interventionist policy, reproduced it in the pages of his magazine as part of his ongoing campaign to rouse public support for that policy in the press and on the airwaves.

It made her name.

Life
wanted to do a story on D. H. Spaulding but he didn’t exist. Maxie counseled: “You have to keep the mystique going. If you come out and take the credit for what you’ve done—then there’s no mystique anymore. Instead you’re a pretty girl and people come out with their claws. I can guarantee that there won’t be quite the same respect for you, my girl, as there is for this dignified-sounding D.H., whoever the fuck he is.” She laughed hard, and her laugh by then was raspy, because she smoked Chesterfields night and day.