Cascade Read Online Free PDF Page B

when she stood in the vestibule of the Round Church with her mother’s wedding veil tied to her hair and looked down at Asa, waiting at the altar, his brother, Silas, by his side, she considered that maybe Lil had been right—she had no business marrying Asa, but one foot in front of the other took her down the aisle, and before she could really take stock of it all, there she was with a ring on her left finger, with no idea that Jacob Solomon was about to walk into her life, and that her father would die a mere two months after the wedding.

    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