Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  Abby pulled her collar close about her and gazed around, her eyes flat. “Nothing’s like it was, is it? Not here, not anywhere. And now Boston’s serious about building that reservoir and you might lose it.”

  “Does Boston know something we don’t know? Do you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Because I can’t lose the playhouse. I just can’t let that happen.”

  “But what will you do, if it comes to that?”

  Dez didn’t know. She didn’t know what she would do. She fumbled to unlock the door. A dry summer and renewed drought concerns had pushed the state to draft emergency measures in October. A new reservoir was vital, and, since it would take years to build and fill, the push was on to choose a site and start construction. “Until the legislature passes the appropriation bill, nothing’s official. And if it does pass, it’s only the river they’re taking, not necessarily the town. There are two big valley towns on the river that can accommodate a basin—us and Whistling Falls, and Whistling Falls has a much smaller population. No public buildings to speak of. They’d have less to destroy.”

  She pushed open the door. Inside, there was the smell of mildew. Frustrating, the way a structure could seem to stand unscathed for years, yet as soon as life departed, rot set in. Always, there were signs of mice: a sharp smell of urine and black droppings along the baseboards. The costumes smelled musty, even though she had given them all such a good airing during that windy week they’d had in March. The morning sun, which used to shine through the upper windows and light up the rafters, seeped in through grimy glass. No one had gotten to those upper panes in—oh, at least two years. She hadn’t been able to do much these past months. In the old days they had taken help for granted—there had always been handymen and cleaners, seamstresses, yardmen, cooks, and window washers. Now, with Rose gone, she had no help at all.

  Their footsteps echoed in the paneled wood vestibule. She wished she could wave a hand and reveal, like a movie, a piece of the past. This was the very place, when she was nine, where the great, then-young, Richard Leslie knelt down to button her shoe. Did she plan to be an actress when she grew up, he asked, and she said she was going to be a painter like Mary Cassatt. Those were the years her mother was still alive, and she still liked looking at the Cassatt book of color plates, page after page of mothers and their children.

  Now she pointed out the tiled floor, the way the titles of the plays were inlaid with white tiles into the perimeter. A glass display case dominated the center of the room, standing tall and empty. “This was where my father used to display his First Folio on production nights.”

  But many people didn’t know what a First Folio was, and obviously, by the blank look on Abby’s face, she was one of them, so the story had to start from scratch: William Hart’s First Folio was part of the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays. His edition had been in excellent condition, with its original calf binding. Dez used her arms, measuring neck to waist, to describe how big it was. While he was still in his twenties, William Hart had purchased the first item for what eventually became a rare and valuable collection of Shakespearean memorabilia—a somewhat-battered 1685 Fourth Folio that he bought for $107.50 on thirty days’ credit. But as his wealth grew, so did the collection—early playbills and props, dozens of miniatures. In 1906 he finally got his hands on the prize: a pristine copy of the First Folio that cost him fifty thousand dollars, and he didn’t care that he’d had to sell nearly 80 percent of his U.S. Steel stock to pay for it.

  “He usually kept it wrapped in protective cloths and stored in a dry vault, but on play nights, he’d set it on that.” She pointed to the red velvet plinth, turned pink and even white in patches. “It was one of the things that made this playhouse so famous.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “A collector, from Washington. He was building a Shakespeare library there.”

  “So it was the first one ever printed. Well, no wonder! And to think it was here, of all places.”

  “Well, no—‘first folio’ means it was part of the first printing, the very first run.”

  “Oh.”

  “But only about five hundred were part of that original printing, so they’re very rare, very valuable, especially in the condition my father’s was in. Only about a hundred are known to exist now. And if Shakespeare’s friends hadn’t published it, the plays would have been lost forever. Forever. Doesn’t the idea of something lost forever just make you want to weep? I don’t like the word weep but it’s the only word that will do.”

  “Oh, Dezzy.” For the first time Abby’s eyes were kind.

  “It’s like the thought of them tearing down all our buildings. How can you just flood a place as if it never existed?”

  “I don’t know, Dez.” Abby peered down the hall that linked the vestibule to the theater. It was still lined with the handsomely framed, autographed photographs of the movie and stage stars who once flocked to Cascade because the summer stage gave them a certain cachet that Hollywood alone did not. These managed to impress her but not much else did, and when they entered the theater itself, Dez saw it, too, through Abby’s eyes: the weak light illuminating the rows of empty seats, the stark angular balconies, the bare wooden thrust stage. The rich tapestries that hung high on the walls, above the paneling and between the ceiling beams, seemed to have lost their luster.

  How different from how it once was. Her father had believed in reaching all the senses, so his productions were filled with color and noise and, when possible, with smells: smoke, perfumed oils, even hay bales reeking of horse urine.

  He had designed the theater himself: a carved wooden masterpiece with thrust stage, tiered balconies, and oak columns. Tudor paneling and amber lanterns lined the walls. A gilt lion roared down from the strap-work ceiling. Through the years, magazines and newspapers had made much of “New England’s bit of Elizabethan England,” stories that always recounted how William Hart visited Cascade as a young man, how he and his brother had just cast fishing lines into the river when a commotion in the reeds led them to save a three-year-old child, wandered off from her family. Years later, in 1906, a career in theater abandoned at thirty, he was eastern superintendent of J. P. Morgan’s New Haven Railroad and one day sat beside a young widow on a train. They got to talking, and, truth being stranger than fiction, she turned out to be the same Caroline Haywood whom William and Edward had saved from drowning. William was then forty-four years old, unmarried and restless, with enough personal wealth to leave the railroad and live a dream: to run a theater dedicated to producing the works of Shakespeare. He married Caroline and together they opened the Cascade Playhouse in 1908, the year the Interstate Commerce Commission began its infamous investigation of the finances of the New Haven Railroad.

  Fate had gotten William Hart out of the corrupt railroad in time; fate had led him to Caroline. Fate would save the playhouse, he had believed. It simply had to.

  Abby dropped her head back to read the words printed in gilt on the ceiling above the gilded lion. All the world’s a stage; And all the men and women merely players. She wasn’t the kind of person who faked enthusiasm. “It’s so dead,” she said. “So dead you’d never—”

  The shriek of the train’s whistle drowned her out. William Hart always had to stage plays around the train’s timetable, so as not to have such a shriek interrupt a soliloquy or pledge of lasting loyalty.

  Dez began to feel irritated. What did Abby expect? They were in the middle of a national economic failure, after all. And a theater that had been sitting empty was nothing like the nights it had seen, every moment changing from one production to the next, never exactly the same show twice. So different from the movies. She described Kathryn Tranero as Cleopatra in 1925, how the crowd stamped its feet so hard all the frames hung crooked on the walls the next day. “We had her here just as her career started to go crazy. My father contracted her that spring, then in summer Queen of the Nile came out. When she arrived in August
, the newspapermen took up an entire floor of the hotel.”

  But it was like looking at a very old woman and saying, She was beautiful in her youth. And they both knew it.

  “I suppose it’s hard on you without Rose.”

  Dez blinked back sudden emotion. “That goes without saying.” I might live twenty more years, Rose said, once it was clear Asa wouldn’t offer her a room. Can’t last on savings all that time, can’t risk ending up in the poorhouse.

  “If we could, I’d do it,” Asa had said privately to Dez. But they were going to need those rooms eventually. Better for Rose to move to her sister’s now, while she still had her health.

  Dez remembered Rose, stoic and dry-eyed until the hour she boarded the train to Chicago, then her face crumpled in a way that Dez could still see when she closed her eyes.

  On Spruce Street, Lil Montgomery bumped into them, on her way out of the Telephone & Telegraph office where she worked. Her hair was rolled up under a drab hat that was doing everything it could to take away from the smartness of the bottle-green tunic jacket she was wearing.

  “Abby, you remember me talking about Lil. We’ve been friends all our lives. Lil, here’s my friend Abby, from Boston.” Thinking, Please muster up some enthusiasm, show Abby that Cascade still is, at heart, a vibrant, welcoming place. But Lil asked, oh, was Abby a woman artist, too—not even remembering who Abby was, though Dez had certainly mentioned her enough times. Lil sighed and said it was a shame Abby had picked such a dismal time to come, and Dez realized that Lil was always sighing—sighing if someone on the other end of the line took too long to give her the telephone number they wanted to connect to, sighing if Zeke was out of the butter beans she was counting on for her supper. All those sighs had had the effect of giving her chest a slightly collapsed appearance, as if it were just steeling itself for more disappointment.

  “I remember you talking about her,” Abby said when Lil was out of earshot. She suddenly squealed, and clutched Dez’s wrist. “Wait—was she the one—?”

  Yes. Lil was.

  It had all come out in a terrible burst just before the wedding, a lashing out, a detailing of everything about Dez that had always bothered Lil. It had come out because Frederick Marsh, Lil’s date for the wedding, left abruptly for Ohio for a chance at a forty-dollar-a-month job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, and because Dez made the error of confessing to Lil her mixed feelings about her upcoming hasty marriage.

  Lil’s spew had boiled down to this: What kind of woman wouldn’t be happy to be marrying Asa Spaulding?

  Had Lil harbored secret hopes regarding Asa? It seemed so.

  “She apologized almost immediately. She’s just one of those people who keeps things bottled up until she explodes, then embarrasses herself.”

  But Dez had been more unsettled than she had wanted to admit. What was the nature of a friendship that could sour so easily? It was the nature of life in a small community. People chose friends and spouses from the small, available pool. It did not matter which small town you lived in. You would find a friend, a spouse in any old place. The next day, 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 River Road before acres of forest formed Pine Point, the craggy isthmus near Whistling Falls. It was the only inhabited home on River Road. Stiff brown grass was finally giving way to green. On the river, fog rose off the last of the ice remnants and moved in wisps around the birch grove. How silent it was, how silent it always was! There were bird sounds, water sounds. Sometimes the rustling of dry leaves. Sometimes rain. Once or twice an hour, trains rumbled across the river.

  “Asa inherited this house after his mother died, which was two years ago,” Dez said, holding the back door open for Abby. “But I still haven’t lost the sense that I’m living in someone else’s space.”

  Inside, Abby shook her head at the sight of the parlor, dark and full of wood and china bric-a-brac. “Oh, toots. It’s awful! Why don’t you throw it all out?” Along the west wall sat three claret-colored velvet stools that looked like kneelers in a Catholic confessional. Abby gave one a kick. “What the hell are these?”

  A jumble that had belonged to Mrs. Spaulding. “Asa’s one of those people who really doesn’t like change,” Dez said. “But I have to say he was generous about this.” She opened the door to the studio, as bright as the parlor was dark. “It’s got th
e steadiest light in the house.”

  Abby stepped inside, her eyes taking the measure of the workspace—the three easels and the long table cluttered with stretching supplies, jars of linseed and poppy oils, tins of paints and china plates, brushes, badger tools. The wooden shelves that bowed with the weight of books and photographs, and supported the drying racks below.

  One easel contained a finished portrait of two sisters from Worcester, nieces of the New York Pullmans. A rare commission she had managed to snag, Dez said, although whether she would ever collect payment was another story. Twice, the mother had called in to pick it up, but money was tight, even for people who had plenty of it. The mother wanted to be sure the portrait was exactly right, and she was picky. First, she said that the color of Marjorie’s dress wasn’t quite right, that in real life the velvet was a much darker green. And then the younger girl decided she wanted her doll painted into the portrait.

  Abby gave the two sisters a long look. “I can tell exactly what kinds of girls these are; you’ve managed to capture that, haven’t you? They’re spoiled, but they’re not bad girls, are they?” She turned her attention to the other, new canvas: the squared-off view of grass. Seeing it anew, with fresh eyes, Dez’s enthusiasm for it sank a bit. It wasn’t quite right. The blades of grass needed to challenge the canvas’s small size, appear to spill out of the boundaries. They weren’t quite tall enough. Something.

  It was an awful feeling—discontent. Especially when it happened in the middle of a social time. Because all you wanted to do was get back to work and try to make it right, but you couldn’t. You had to put it from your mind. Either that, or become some kind of eccentric who did whatever she wanted, regardless of who was around, and then what kind of life did you have?

  “I remember this,” Abby said, reaching for a small framed portrait of Dez. “Miss Farrell did this during demonstration. She liked you.”

  “I liked her.” And she liked that depiction of herself, the mix of chrome red and cadmium yellow wax crayon for hair forced somewhat unsuccessfully into the wavy style everyone else had worn so effortlessly. Harsh black strokes illustrated the rest: her lean body, her too-broad nose, her way of biting her lower lip as she worked, bent forward from the waist.