“You’ve locked it,” she said. Indeed, the lid was fixed tight, with a sturdy brass padlock.
Was she supposed to guess at its contents? What was inside had nothing to do with husbands, with Asa—that she could be fairly sure of. And it certainly wouldn’t hold any treasure. Back in September, when she’d first come home, she’d been sent down the basement stairs of the playhouse to the safe—the Victor Manganese Steel Vault with Triple Time Lock and backup key, concealed behind a shale imposter’s wall, so she could empty it of the last few bills that remained inside. That money had paid Rose’s wages and kept them in food for a few weeks.
“What I’ve locked in there is something infinitely worth saving, though I can’t tell you, right now, what it is.” He spoke somewhat gravely. “But it’s critical that you, number one, keep it safe,” he said, counting off on one hand, “and two, don’t open it until the night the playhouse reopens—however far in the future that may be.”
“But you’ll be there to do that.”
He opened his other hand to reveal the lock’s key, tied to a length of leather. “In case I’m not, my dear,” he said, reaching to push the key into the deep patch pocket she sewed on most of her clothes. The small movement made him catch his breath, and when he lay back against the pillows, she looked on his face with fresh eyes: the bluish pouches on top of his cheekbones, the skin thin as rice paper.
“I’m not feeling right,” he admitted, motioning to stop her from whatever she might instinctively scurry away to do—call Dr. Proulx, fetch medicine. “I’ve lived in this body long enough to know what feels right. But it’s nothing I can put my finger on, nothing Addis can help.” His ragged breathing evened out and he struggled to sit up straighter. “The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,” he quoted, in his old stage tenor, “which hurts and is desired.”
Then he held her gaze. We’ve avoided straight talk for too long, that gaze said.
“You’re a painter. You know the plays. You can stage one. It’s all about vision, putting a shape to things—you know that. You could get that friend Abby of yours to come out from Boston and help. You must stage a triumphant Tempest, I think—but regardless, do promise me that there will be an opening night. That no matter how long it takes, you’ll open it again.”
Dr. Proulx had assured them both that William Hart had plenty of years left in him, but she didn’t contradict. He hadn’t raised the subject of the reservoir, so neither did she. Maybe now he’d start sleeping through the night.
“Of course I promise,” she said. “I love the playhouse, too.”
He smiled for the first time. “And Dez? Asa’s a good man.”
She knew that. “I just wish he wasn’t in such a hurry for children.” On Christmas morning, Asa had mentioned that maybe, with luck, there’d be one more Spaulding next year. Or two. “There’ve been more than one set of twins in my family,” he’d said. Dez’s smile had been reflexive, full of alarm. Across the table, Rose had caught her eye with a discreet, sympathetic wink.
“I did stipulate, in the will, that the ‘first child of the union’ inherits.”
Child. That was a word that plotted out her life like stage directions, even more than the words I do had. “But what if I don’t have a child? Or want one?”
“Well, upon Asa’s death the playhouse would go to you, and if you were gone, then to the town, in trust. That way I’m assured of some kind of continuity, don’t you see?”
She suddenly saw very well. In the upheaval of leaving Boston, and losing their home and moving in with Asa, Dez had pictured her father’s heart getting stronger, the world returning to normal, men going to jobs every day again. Her father reopening the playhouse, Dez showing her paintings in the vestibule and some gallery owner from New York exclaiming, I must have these, and Asa—well, things turned fuzzy when it got to Asa. Had she imagined they could return to the casual camaraderie of dating? See you in a few weeks.
Her mind flashed to Jacob Solomon. At one point, she had been telling him how they’d lost pretty much everything. “And then we had absolutely no place to live,” she’d said, “except the playhouse, which was impossible, and so then—”
She had stopped short. She had been about to say and then I married Asa. But she hadn’t. Because she had been enjoying the little frisson of attraction between them. Because she hadn’t wanted to kill it with talk of her husband.
Her pulse began to slow, to thud thickly through her veins. The connection with Jacob had felt harmless enough, but there had been that little zap of attraction, undeniably, and Dez remembered, suddenly, a woman she had not thought about in years, a friend’s mother, discovered to have been carrying on a relationship with one of the New York summer men. Ruinous.
“Dez—” Her father broke into her thoughts with a voice that was gruff with embarrassment. “Did you marry Asa so I could have this?” He gestured to the snug iron bed, the walls covered in rose-and-vine wallpaper, the casement window with its view to the Cascade River.
Of course she had. He knew she had. Their wealth had been nothing but vapor, and deep in the fog that was comprehension of that fact, Dez had felt the deepest kind of panic as she’d packed her steamer trunk and returned to Cascade from Boston.
“What were we supposed to do, Dad? Live in the playhouse?”
He looked toward the window, toward town, where the playhouse would be sitting in the dark, its eaves collecting snow. “I suppose I wanted to believe you’d have married him anyway.”
She closed her eyes. She’d bought an apron. Brown and calico, twenty-six cents pressed firmly into Jacob Solomon’s palm. To make sure the relationship started on the right foot, so they would both feel comfortable doing what she proposed: that he stop by on his Thursdays in Cascade. To talk about art, to swap ideas. Until now, Art News had been her lifeline, read cover to cover. Now each week would wait for Thursday.
“Marriage is serious business, Dez.” But his voice lacked conviction. “Maybe I was too wrapped up in my pride, too worried about the playhouse.”
Dez eyed Portia’s casket and thought, Maybe you were. And now you’ve gone and given it to Asa but expect me to be the one to save it.
He looked at her as if he’d read her thoughts, and opened his mouth to speak. He coughed instead, a cough that developed into full-blown wet, phlegmy hacking. Dez hurried to the bathroom to fill his glass, then ran back with it, hoping the look on her face hadn’t upset him. He sipped at the water, cheeks bright red, eyes running.
She waited while he cleared his throat and dabbed at his eyes with small, wiping motions; she waited while he drank more water and arranged his blankets and lay his head upon the pillows, skin barely there, barely even a color, just a veil over veins.
“Level with me,” he said, and sank lower into the pillows. “Do you love him at all? The truth now.”
“Of course I do.”
He fixed his eyes on her, as if he wasn’t sure whether to trust her answer. “I know that after all your training, it must seem like it’s come to nothing. But life has a way of working out and, Dez, I do urge you to welcome children. Even one child will make a difference in your life that you cannot fathom. I promise you, my girl.”
She thought of Asa, wanting his Christmas twins, with no idea that his wife was not at all ready for a single child. Asa, with his kind ways, his tall and solid presence. Asa, who was at that moment innocently going about his workday, who was likely in the back room of his drugstore, mixing prescriptions. No—the banjo clock had already struck four. Mrs. Raymond would have slipped home to fix her husband’s supper before the evening rush. Asa would be greeting customers at the fountain, grilling franks and mixing Cokes. “Good to see you,” he would say to each customer walking in. “Thanks for coming in.”
Dismay is a small, quiet emotion. We say we are filled with dismay, when actually dismay causes us to pause and quietly check our consciences.
Dez always liked to think that if her father had not died tha
t day, she would have wrenched herself onto the straight and narrow right then and there. She would have walked to town and begged Mrs. Mayhew to let the Harts live at the hotel for a while. She could have offered to wash linens, clean toilets, anything, and despite the secret satisfaction that that Cascade busybody might have felt to see once-grand people like the Harts laid low, Ella Mayhew was a good woman at heart. She probably would have said yes, they could have a room. They’d have called back Attorney Peterson to rewrite the will. In summer, they could feasibly have moved into the playhouse.
But her father did die. She left him propped up with a copy of Proust that they both pretended he had the energy to read. Then she went downstairs to fetch the deviled egg snack that Rose left on a white enamel tray for him each morning. Rose, who insisted on continuing on as his housekeeper, even though he no longer owned a house. “What else have I got to do?” she’d say. “And after all he’s done for me.”
Dez was lifting the tray, lacing her fingers around its metal handles, when she heard it, heard the odd, knee-buckling thud. Forever after in her memory the next instants would be a muddle of images: Portia’s casket lying on its side on the floor, the Proust flipped upside down and resting beside it, the lamplight’s long beams like fingers down the blanket that just minutes ago he had tugged on. Everything slowed down and she became both empty and heavy, as if all that made up her body was sliding through the floor.
She found herself downstairs, lifting the telephone, the calico apron and coffee cups sitting on the table like relics from another life, her fingers like rubber on the push button that wouldn’t push, the crank handle that wouldn’t turn, until she got Pearl, the high school helper, on the line and then Pearl didn’t stop for breath: He left here a good hour ago, Zeke Davenport came in all upset, well, they’re all upset aren’t they, the news from Boston isn’t good.
She managed to break in. Then she huddled by the back door to wait.
The wind rattled the back door. The snow was turning to sleet. It tapped at the glass in a way she used to find comforting. She shivered and wrapped her arms tight around her until the Buick skidded to a stop outside and Asa came striding through the back door, shaking the snow off his shoulders, stomping his feet, Dr. Proulx hurrying to catch up behind him.
4
The morning Abby was due to stop by on her way to her new life in New York City, Dez woke with a thought running through her head: one of many, one of many. How did one stand out among many? Because one did, undoubtedly. But how to convey the idea with paint?
Asa was downstairs waiting for his breakfast, she knew that. His bedside calendar, which he flipped each morning the minute he opened his eyes, read April 24, 1935, Wednesday. Arthur Godfrey was on the radio and the milkman was on the back step banging bottles, which meant it was 6:30, barely enough time to slip the cool glass thermometer under her tongue and record the reading. But she lay still an extra few minutes, working out details for her idea, which was still filmy, still barely a vision, in need of being nailed down before it evaporated. One of many, each unique. Maybe raindrops, the emphasis on a singular raindrop sliding down a pane of glass, a juxtaposition of the natural world and things made by humans.
Yet—depicting water was one of her weaknesses.
What else? Something from the natural world definitely, maybe with some element added to suggest that this one truth applied to all truths. Trees? Grass?
Asa called up from the bottom of the stairs. “Dez?” She heard the concern in his voice, the hope that it was finally morning sickness making her late.
Grass could work—blades of grass, giant blades, two feet tall and filling the canvas, with one that grabbed the eye’s attention. How, she did not know, but the idea was solid enough to get her out of bed and down into the kitchen to fix her husband’s eggs.
Haven, refuge, harbor, sanctuary, studio. After the wedding, Dez claimed this narrow space, the house’s former birthing room, as her own. The room then was cramped and dim, inhabited by the ghosts of Asa’s female ancestors, and she had recoiled a bit, the first time she opened the door and peeked in. But she brightened it up, took away the gloom, dismantled the rickety iron bed and carried it down to the basement. Threw out the mattress with its ancient bloodstains, removed the dark green roller shades from the windows. Whitewashed the walls and floorboards.
Now the room offered decent light off the river. Portia’s casket sat on a shelf where she could see it while she worked. Along one wall, she had pasted the stories the Boston Evening Transcript printed when she won the Cabot Prize and the Henderson First Place. A lumpy horsehair sofa, with a thick, soft quilt thrown over it, lined the inside wall where she slumped when she was feeling stuck or uninspired.
But that didn’t happen today. By ten, the new work was off to a good start, underpainting done, composition in place with a transparent wash of linseed oil and paint in cool blues opposed to the warmer greens and yellows she would use later. As soon as Asa left, she’d sat down and sketched three thumbnails, deciding on the one with the best-defined sense of light: a from-the-ground, root-level perspective of tall bluegrass growing wild next to a fencepost, a kind of moment from childhood, when you got down on the ground to really inspect things. The fencepost was barely a suggestion—a bit of wood, a small length of rusty barbed wire. Grass was the predominant subject, the focal point the foremost blade, and different from every other blade.
She slipped out of her painter’s smock, wiped her brushes clean with a rag, and set them in turpentine. In any event, it was one more thing to show Abby. Abby. The train she said she would be arriving on was only twenty minutes away, and she hadn’t phoned or telegrammed to say she wasn’t coming after all, that it really did make more sense to take the coastal train to New York.
I always said I’d see Cascade, last week’s letter said. And now she would be here within the hour.
It was a ten-minute walk to town, down River Road, across the bridge, up Main Street, then left on the common. She was preoccupied with anticipation when, on the common, Dr. Proulx tripped her up with his cane and nearly knocked her down. His gaze was unfocused, and she smelled whiskey on his breath when he apologized. Addis Proulx was not the sort of man to drink during the day; something was clearly wrong. Dez almost followed after him, and would later wish she had, but the train was blowing its whistle, pulling into the station. Abby.
At the train station, Abby stepped onto the platform looking the same: pretty and rather elfin, with her bee-stung lips and nut-brown cap of hair under a smart little cloche hat. She was a bustling bundle of energy, arranging to leave her luggage inside with the stationmaster, then clapping her hands and saying, “Well, then,” to give Dez her full critical attention. Immediately, Dez sensed disappointment. “Oh, my dear,” Abby said. “What is it that looks so different about you?”
Dez didn’t remember Abby being so hawkeyed, so critical. “My hair?” The thick head of hair Abby always saw forced into short waves was longer now, untended and left to hang in a cloud around her face.
Abby cocked her head to the side and smiled the cheery-false smile Dez had also forgotten. “Maybe. Though it’s lovely, of course.”
Dez was conscious of vague disappointment, but she didn’t want to be disappointed. She drummed up enthusiasm, exclaimed over Abby’s hat, over the fact that she was finally going to New York. Where they had both planned to be by now. “What will you do down there?”
Abby studied the marble floor a half-second too long before looking up with the same fixed smile. And then it was as if she stepped quietly behind a glass wall.
“No job yet, no plans at all really, but I have a few ideas.”
Dez wasn’t sure how to react. You never knew why a wall had been erected; sometimes it was best to leave walls unmentioned. “Brave of you” seemed a right thing to say.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Abby put a hand on the station door. “All I know is that losing that job at United Shoe was a blessing in disgu
ise.” She gave the door an emphatic push. “It was the excuse I needed to finally go.”
They stepped out of the station to the reality of Cascade in 1935, a reality Dez suddenly saw through Abby’s eyes: a dog sniffing along the empty common, patches of snow under the elms; bare branches scraping a gray sky. Late April, officially spring, yet looking eternally winter, the gloomy light making even the best-kept structures surrounding the common look bleak and impoverished.
The Cascade Hotel was in obvious need of paint, and its rooftop sign, once so grand with tall, gilt letters, looked tawdry. Carson’s milk wagon rumbled by, the hollow clop of horses’ hooves fading down Elm Street.
“This is nothing like I pictured,” Abby said just as Dez thought, This is nothing like the stories I used to tell. She pointed out their old house, a graceful, redbrick Georgian that a lawyer from Springfield had bought but never moved into. The hedge separating the house from the street had not been pruned and now was uneven and leggy; ivy grew wild along the walls.
And the playhouse—it looked small, shuttered, insignificant, as it never had during its August heydays. As they approached, Dez described the opening-night parties they used to have on the lawn, and how in summer those willow trees lining the river were like great canopies, but Abby did not really pay attention. She climbed the front steps to read the sign, hand-lettered by Dez and nailed to the front door.
WILLIAM ALOYSIUS HART
~ Duncan, Gloucester, Prospero, Caesar ~
passed away on December the 27th, 1934.
He built this stage in 1908 and offered twenty-five summers of theatre.
May flights of angels sing him to his rest.
TO REOPEN, EVENTUALLY.
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