Cascade by Maryanne O'Hara Read Free Book Online Page A

back in her chair, pulled a cigarette from her purse, and lit a match to it. She inhaled deeply and blew out the smoke in a long stream, regarding Dez with puzzled sympathy.
    “With your father sick and all your money gone, you were a muddle, poor baby. You just jumped into the fire, didn’t you? Got yourself married when we all vowed we’d have our shows first.”
    “As if having shows is just a matter of wanting them,” Dez said quietly. “I made the right decision.”
    Abby jumped up and tapped her cigarette ash into the sink. “Look, honey, I don’t want to upset you, but I think you’re in trouble here! You took a wrong turn, understandably, because your father was dying and needed a place to live, but now you’re walking down Wrong Turn Lane as if you can’t do anything about it. You don’t have babies. No babies means you can
leave
.”
    It was as if some exotic, preposterous bird had flown in the window and started to speak. “I couldn’t do that to Asa, hurt him like that!”
    “You stick around, you’re going to have a pack of kids. Name a woman artist who had children.”
    There was someone, she was sure, but Abby didn’t give her a chance to remember who it might be.
    “See? You can’t. No one who does anything seriously is also a mother. Unless you
want
babies.”
    “The thought of having one right now scares me to death,” Dez admitted. Every month it was the same: bad dreams and nail-nibbling anxiety as she waited for the proof that she had escaped yet again. But how long could she keep risking fate?
    The temptation to confess was too much. She told Abby how Rose—“Yes, that sweet old lady Rose, of all people”—with absolutely no self-consciousness, taught her, before she left for Chicago, how to calculate dangerous days: lying quietly with a thermometer, keeping charts.
    “On unsafe days, I keep Asa away with excuses. On safe days I encourage him because a few raucous mornings in a row usually keep him content for a good long while.”
    “Good girl.”
    “I don’t know about that. I don’t know that it’s forgivable.”
    “Oh, you’re too hard on yourself. What about that artist friend you wrote about? What’s he like? Tell me.”
    “If you’re looking for scandal, you’re not going to find it. Honestly, he’s just a friend. And very talented. He went from studying with Lincoln Bell—”
    “He studied with Lincoln Bell?”
    Incredibly, Jacob had. And that wasn’t the half of it, Dez said. When he got to the Art Students League, in 1929, John Sloan and Reginald Marsh were there and they encouraged him to get out and paint the streets. People liked his work, it began to sell. He did a show at the Painters and Sculptors Gallery. The New York School of Art invited him to teach. “Of course, when things got bad, they had to fire him, along with all the other junior instructors, but he says he’s thankful, in a way, because that forced him to do all the traveling he did. I honestly don’t know how I’ll stand it when he leaves.”
    “Where’s he going?”
    She told Abby about Jacob’s goal to return to New York as soon as he’d sold off his father’s inventory.
    “You’re stuck on him, aren’t you?”
    “I’m not.”
    “You are.” Abby narrowed her eyes. “I hear it in your voice.”
    Dez felt herself close up, become prim. “Thanks to him I’m ridding myself of that Boston ‘formula’ I was working in so completely after all the informality of the Paris school. I’ve really begun to loosen my palette again.”
    “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.”
    But how to answer? One day back in February, Jacob had brought ingredients for egg tempera: a bag of dry pigment and an envelope of thick, crystallized salt ground into powder. The instructions were simple, he said: separate the yolk from the white, pinch the yolk over a bowl, add the pigment, mix in a small amount of water, not too much. Keep it sealed and work with small amounts,