Cascade

by Maryanne O'Hara

  At Lenox, she was met by Albert, one of James’s assistants. As they drove through town, with its prosperous-looking storefronts, Dez imagined that Cascade might have looked like Lenox if it had been allowed to grow after the Depression. Shiny new cars lined the streets, pedestrians filled the sidewalks. Dez counted two ladies’ dress shops, two coffee shops, a stationer’s, a barber, and two drugstores.

  At the Curtis Hotel, Albert handed her luggage off to a porter, then took her directly to the playhouse a short mile away. Though she had seen it in its new home many times, it was always momentarily startling to see it in another space. It was no longer riverside, but its location, set back from the road and framed by tall pines, had its own peaceful beauty. Box hedges had grown in around the foundation; the building no longer looked transplanted. Rather, it looked like it had graced Lenox forever.

  Stepping inside evoked a flood of memories—of her parents, of Rose, of Cascade—but what struck her most was that her father built something so long ago, before two wars now, and it had lasted. It had mattered. The wood shone. The ticket window had been lined with new glass and brass trim. The new drinks bar was a beautiful, curved mahogany. The plinth in the display case had been covered in fresh red velvet, and on it rested a fine, imposing-looking reproduction of the First Folio, opened now to The Tempest.

  James wouldn’t arrive until late afternoon, in time for the cocktail party, but the director, the manager, and the cast were all on hand to greet her. Prospero was being played by the veteran actor Richard Leslie, now sixty-eight years old, the man who had once knelt to button her shoe when she was a child. As a younger man in Cascade, he had played both Hamlet and Macbeth. Older, he looked remarkably like William Hart, enough so that her poster of Prospero could have used either man as model. “My dear Desdemona!” he cried. “Did you ever think you would see the day?” He draped an arm across her shoulders and they looked around, necks craned to take it all in as Dez shook her head, no. No, she really had never thought to see such a magnificent rebirth.

  Behind the mahogany bar, James had arranged for the construction of a concealed fire cupboard, with a paneled door that swung open when the top left corner was pressed. Dez tried it out with one push of her index finger. There was a click, and the door popped ajar. The cupboard itself was four feet high and four feet deep, lined with metal. She slid Portia’s casket inside for safekeeping.

  The preshow cocktail party on the lawn recalled past parties, but was, in reality, far more elegant. These days, any occasion was an occasion to dress up—men in tails, women in long gowns. Dez wore emerald satin and a rope of pearls around her neck. Her hair, grown long, fell in waves down her back.

  Four musicians perched on bamboo chairs under a bank of trees, Haydn’s string quartets drifting along the evening air. A long table, spread with white linen, displayed buckets of champagne and rows of crystal glasses. White-gloved waiters passed frosted grapes and tiny canapés on silver trays that glinted and flashed in the sinking sun. James, remembering Dez’s stories, had ordered madeleines, platters of them; they graced a long table near the playhouse door. Dez bit into one, remembering Stan and his tale of nearly having choked to death. She never again, after that last letter, heard from his wife.

  James arrived just as the party got under way, in time for the hearty hellos, the shoulder claps. When Dez caught sight of him, striding across the lawn, greeting people, a grateful shiver passed through her. How extraordinarily lucky she and her father and the playhouse had been that the planets had aligned themselves and produced James Lawrence King as savior. Fate had played a role, she was sure of it. The dots had connected—the postcards, James seeing them, his Lenox connection, his money, his desire to preserve what deserved preserving.

  Lenox people arrived—local politicians and supporters—all mixed in with the current summer crowd. A small contingent from Cascade showed up, a group of about ten, including Zeke Davenport. Zeke had shrunk, turned slim and white—he would die of lung cancer within the year—but he was jolly as ever. He grabbed her in a bear hug and laughed and said, “They’ll never see the likes of a Falstaff like mine, though.”

  Personal friends arrived, too—associates of Dez’s and James’s, friends from New York and Pennsylvania, all of them swarming around with congratulations, with talk. The conversation became, for Dez, a background buzz, a general feeling of well-being. Abby had come up with her husband, Bill Richdale, the stockbroker she met at Dez’s first show and married during the war, on one of his leaves. Abby was chic in a claret off-the-shoulder gown, and she looked around approvingly. “Now this is what I imagined Cascade to be, all those years ago.”

  Asa did not come, though Dez had invited him. He still, technically, owned the theater, and would until he died, but he had done the decent thing and turned all operations over to the James Lawrence King Philanthropic Foundation. He sent a letter, cordial but brief, offering congratulations and “all best wishes.” Early on, when war was declared, he’d tried to enlist, but was deemed necessary in his civilian capacity. Instead, he married a widow from Springfield, a woman with two children. She and Asa had not had any of their own. In a movie, he would have married Lil, but life was not a movie at the Criterion Theater, and as far as Dez knew, Lillian Montgomery never did marry.

  After all those early years of hoping to see Jacob, Dez never truly expected that he would respond to her advertisements and come. Yet, when she glanced across the lawn and saw him under the pines, wearing a dark suit in place of black tie, using his program to shield his eyes and scout the crowd, his presence felt inevitable.

  She excused herself—barely aware of whom she was excusing herself from—and crossed the lawn. Inwardly, she was trembling, but how easy it turned out, thanks to that balm, the passage of time, to behave like he was anyone, to say, “Jacob Solomon, I don’t believe it,” to thrust out her hands and take his in welcome. Up close, he looked remarkably the same—a bit more chiseled in the face perhaps, the roundness of youth gone. But his dark hair was still thick, only a few silver strands shimmered through the black.

  They said the things that people say when they meet after a long absence: How are you? So good of you to come. But underneath the pleasantries and catching up, their eyes said other things:

  I thought I’d never see you again.

  I missed you.

  I thought of you for years.

  Then why did you let all those years go by?

  I don’t know. I don’t know why I let all those years go by.

  She heard herself chattering, saying she had heard he’d ended up in New Haven and wondered why he’d gone there after working so hard to get back to New York, but inside she was willing time to slow down, to stop for just a moment so she could marvel, could drink in the fact that they were actually together, talking, after all these years.

  “I guess,” he said, and he was rueful, “because I’d been part of a couple of shows, and no one even noticed. They didn’t even say I was bad. And then they were phasing out the federal art projects, so when that teaching offer came, even though it was only for a year, I grabbed it. I had to. I had a wife and daughter to support.”

  She nodded, knowing better than anyone the role of luck, of chance. But what of Dr. Proulx’s legacy, she wondered?

  He seemed to read her thoughts. It was tied up for years, he said. “When I finally got it, I honestly didn’t know what to do with it until I realized it should be for Esther. She’s bright. She’ll go to college.”

  “Is your family with you?” She peered around, more out of politeness than any real sense he’d come with someone, because some part of her sensed something was amiss.

  He shook his head. It was a long story, that shake said. “Get back to your guests, please. I just wanted to congratulate you.”

  “You’re my guest,” she said, insisting, until she finally got the story out of him: how after the teaching stint ended, with the war ramping up, he’d enlisted. How Ruth’s mother, Sarah, had
moved down to New Haven to help out with Esther. How he’d been in Samoa six months when he got word that Ruth had woken up one morning with a headache like a hammer; a few hours later, Sarah found her on the floor. “They said it was cerebral apoplexy. A little time bomb we never knew was there. She lasted only a few days, and everyone said it was a blessing, considering the state she was in. But I don’t know about that. It’s been hard on Esther.”

  “Of course,” Dez said, infusing those two little words with warmth and concern. Esther would be—nearly twelve? Of course. Twelve. Twelve years since Jacob said, “Ruth is pregnant. We’re married.” Just a little older than the age Dez was when she lost her own mother.

  “So it’s been a tough road,” she said.

  Somewhere, a laughing voice called out, “Where the hell is Dez?” She slipped into the shadow of the pine tree, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t spot her.

  “Dez, I’ve taken up enough of your time. It’s your big night. Everyone wants to see you.”

  “No, no.” She positioned herself deeper into the shadow. “I see these people all the time.” But the cocktail hour was ending, the sun sinking, waiters tidying up, groups of people starting to drift toward the doors.

  Jacob glanced around, then spoke in an embarrassed rush. “You sent me a letter, years ago, after that first one.”

  She looked at him: yes?

  “I found it,” he said, as if he had been waiting forever to tell her. “Just a few months ago, cleaning out Ruth’s closet. I found that letter. In a candy box. And there were all these other things. Clippings about you, that sketch I did of you. It had gone missing early on, when we were first in New York.”

  She shook her head, confused.

  “I never got that second letter, Dez. I never knew Ruth intercepted it. I never even thought she knew about you.”

  “Oh,” she said, a single, startled syllable.

  The last fingers of sunlight illuminated one side of his face and she saw the lines around his eyes, saw that he was changed, after all. Of course, they were both changed.

  “The letter didn’t really excuse anything, but it was an explanation,” she said. “An apology.”

  “I know.” And he had written his own letter in haste, he said. In anger. It was pure coincidence that her first letter had come right after he’d spoken with Al Stein. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Well, it appears we were star-crossed, Jacob. It seems fitting, considering we’re at a Shakespeare theater.”

  “Tell me,” he said. “And I won’t be embarrassed if you say no, but did you run those ads for me?”

  She pressed her lips together. Across the lawn, James and Abby and the others stood in a circle. Abby leaned in to say something and the group erupted in laughter. “Partly,” she admitted.

  “I missed you all those years,” he said. “Missed your friendship. You were right, you know. We were two people alive in the same city and not seeing each other—I don’t know. It would have been wrong, I know, but in better ways it would have been right.”

  She heard his words as if from some great distance and wondered when he had changed his mind. Before the war? During it? He surely must have grasped the brevity of a single lifetime, even before Ruth died.

  “I saw glimpses of you,” he said. “The Life article, other mentions here and there. I went to see The Black Veil at the Whitney and God, Dez, I wished I could talk to you about it.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I went as soon as I heard about it.”

  “I’m so glad. And you understood what I was trying to say?”

  “The Nazi message, yes, of course. It was brilliant.”

  She looked down into her glass, at the slender threads of rising bubbles, to hide her disappointment. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t understand her cryptic apology, especially after all the publicity the painting received.

  “It wasn’t intended to be a political message.” She smiled at his confusion. “That was just the way people interpreted it. It was Cascade, Jacob. It was a message to you,” she explained, and as she did, he half-closed his eyes, trying to see the painting in his mind’s eye.

  “God, I wish I’d known,” he said. “For years I was sure you would want nothing to do with me after that awful letter. But then I saw that ad.” He rested his fingertips against her wrist and they burned. Even now, they burned. Rational thought unraveling, ready to fly out the window. Desire was so primal, so hard to control. And to think it had been smoldering all those years, when she was telling herself she could think of him with bemused distance.

  Maybe an epistolary correspondence, she could say. We can be proper, old-fashioned.

  But she couldn’t do it, couldn’t stir it all up again.

  “I’m married, Jacob,” she said. How could he not have known? “To James.”

  He took a single, reflexive step backward. “Right,” he said, almost to himself. “Of course.”

  “I thought you would have known.” The marriage had caused a modest amount of publicity.

  He lifted his head, becoming the cordial, correct self she remembered. “I didn’t.”

  An usher emerged from the playhouse, ringing a bell, and she was aware of James seeking her out, beckoning, striding across the grass.

  Stay for the afterparty, she urged, but he didn’t get a chance to reply. Something was happening, causing everyone to look around and up. There was a collective sound of appreciation, a drawn-out “ohhhh…” followed by applause.

  On the roof of the playhouse, the gathering dusk and a flick of a switch had illuminated a row of round lightbulbs that spelled out SHAKESPEARE in white electric light.

  James headed toward Dez with mild disappointment in his gait—obviously someone had switched on the lights before he intended. But no matter, his manner seemed to say. He made a sweeping, offering gesture with his arm, from Dez to the roof.

  A gift.

  James.

  And next she thought of him, Jacob had slipped away, part of the crowd sweeping into the theater.

  The theater was a polished jewel. Its Elizabethan-style paneling, refinished and waxed, gleamed. New electrical wiring fitted out the lanterns, which glowed with amber light. The new drapes were thick burgundy velvet. Dez and James made their way down the center aisle to the stage, clutching their programs, calling out hellos and thank-yous, waiting for everyone to settle in. The sound of excited chattering was almost deafening, and it was a giddy feeling to look around and imagine her father’s delight. When every seat appeared to be occupied, even up into the rafters, she turned to James. “I think we can begin.”

  James spread his arms and began to clap for silence. The noisy buzz turned to a few voices, then subsided. All eyes looked to him.

  “Dez and I decided not to open the production with a lot of fanfare,” he said. “We would like tonight’s performance to speak for itself, but we would of course like to thank everyone who had a part in preserving this historic gem and we would like to thank all of you for being here.” He looked to Dez. “Desdemona?”

  Dez gave the audience a small wave. The rows; no single face was distinguishable. “This is the day my father trusted would happen. It’s the day he talked about on the last day of his life. I know he is looking down on us with complete and utter delight. We’ll talk and celebrate later, but for now—” She held up both hands like a conductor. “Let the show begin.”

  They took their seats to the sound of applause, clutching each other’s fingers.

  “At last,” James whispered.

  “At last.”

  The lights blinked off. There was a long, drawn-out moment of inky darkness and the play began with a tempestuous noise: a loud crack of thunder and roiling waves, a shipwreck just offshore from an island. In the background sat the stark, skeletal remains of other wrecked ships. Sailors on board cried out and abandoned ship, saying good-bye to their lives.

  As the performance progressed, she imagi
ned her father, standing just offstage, cuing actors, adjusting gowns and crowns and wings. She imagined him simply folding his arms and watching over what he had helped bring to life. Dez had to hand it to the director, his attention to detail was spot-on—sounds that set the right mood, flawless stage sets and lighting, superb performances. Ferdinand and Miranda were perfectly cast, and when they got to the part where they declared their love for each other, when Miranda asked, Do you love me? and Ferdinand, almost ashamed that she even had to ask said, O! heaven! O earth! bear witness to this sound. I, beyond all limit of what else in the world, do love, prize, honour you, Dez couldn’t help but think of Jacob, somewhere behind her in the dark.

  “I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of!” Miranda said, and Dez took James’s hand. Their life was satisfying and good. She must not weep at what she was glad of.

  During the brief intermission, swallowed up in the crush of people at the bar, Dez saw no sign of Jacob, but it was James’s moment anyway, and it was her father’s. The buzzing, the excitement, the glasses raised in William Hart’s memory, belonged to the two men who had made the playhouse happen.

  Her father would have approved of the audience’s eagerness to settle back into their seats. He would be gratified to see the rapt attention they gave the rest of the play. When Richard Leslie paused with quiet fanfare, then gathered himself up to speak the play’s most famous lines, everyone became still and attentive in that way Dez had forgotten.

  “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

  Leslie very emphatically emphasized the we, which seemed to be his way of reminding the audience that they were really listening to Shakespeare talk down through the ages.