“Thank you,” Dez whispered when James inclined his head toward hers. He was nearing sixty now, but he was vigorous and fit, a man who had built an empire of steel yet always found time to appreciate the three graces. Their marriage had been a successful and independent meeting of the minds. They lived weekends in Hastings-on-Hudson; weekdays found Dez in her Central Park studio.
The play wound to its end. Prospero, having relinquished his magic powers, cued the audience to clap by asking them to let him leave the island with the help of your good hands. The clapping filled the rafters, real and enthusiastic—real applause always so spontaneous and exuberant, hard to fake.
The production was a success. Newspapers, next day, would call it a marvelous blend of pageantry and poetry as they praised Leslie’s soaring performance, calling it both arrogant and humble. With the addition of the William Hart Shakespeare Theatre, Lenox promises to be an arts mecca for decades to come, The Sunday Call would write.
Everyone gathered in the vestibule after the show, the actors, still in their costumes, mingling with the guests. Dez was conscious of her eyes sweeping the crowd for Jacob, but there was no sign of him, and she told herself it was for the best. As much as she was tempted to renew the relationship, she couldn’t do it, couldn’t walk into infidelity with her eyes open.
James, behind the drinks bar, signaled to Dez—ready? He pushed on the corner of the concealed cupboard and the door swung open. Dez reached in to retrieve Portia’s casket, the moment almost unreal, but the lead cold and hard to the touch, quite real. She hopped up on the stool that someone had provided and signaled to James, who clinked two glasses together to get everyone’s attention. When the crowd had stilled, upturned faces smiling at her expectantly, she began by thanking everyone, by reciting a brief history of the playhouse, and the tale of its removal from Cascade to Lenox.
Then she held Portia’s casket up high and explained its story. “Those of you who knew my father can well imagine the glee with which he’d have planned something like this. I know he died more comfortably knowing that he would be part of this production tonight.”
“So a toast,” James called out. “To William Hart.”
“Toast!” A hundred glasses lifted into the air. “To William Hart!”
Dez fitted the key into the lock. Her wrists trembled even as she steeled herself for a letdown. Like the unmasking of D. H. Spaulding, nothing in Portia’s box could possibly live up to the excitement and mystery of the unknown. But as she lifted the lid, her heart thudded like hammer blows, regardless. Inside lay two folded sheets of stationery and a rolled handkerchief that she immediately recognized as her father’s. She pressed it to her face with bittersweet disbelief—the smell of his shaving soap still lingered in the fabric, even after the passing of so much time.
Her eyes flooded and she looked down, blinking furiously. She opened the handkerchief, revealing the initials WH embroidered in small, square black letters. A sturdy iron key fell out.
She held up the key to show the crowd, and shrugged to show that she did not know what lock it fit. She unfolded the letters. One was personal. My dear Dez—She squeezed her eyes shut. Later. She would savor it later.
The other letter was addressed to the audience. She held it up and the room went still, everyone all ears. “It’s a letter,” she said. “To all of us here.”
She gathered her composure, and cleared her throat and read. To all of you assembled here, he had written in his grand-orator, playmaster’s voice.
I trust that my daughter has treated you all to a worthy production of The Tempest. The Tempest may have been Shakespeare’s farewell to theater; I make it mine. I felt it was important to open a new season, a new era, with a comedy, with a light heart and a forgiving, forward-looking spirit, and I trust, by now, that the hard times are over and Cascade is once again a thriving summer community.
For every truth there is an equal and opposite truth, and Shakespeare knew that better than most. His plays speak for everyone—but his words are valuable only so long as they are preserved and passed on to new generations.
As many of you know, it was pure good fortune that Mr. Heminge and Mr. Condell collected the plays and had them published at a time when plays were not considered literature and were only just beginning to be published in folio form. Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had never been published at all, so had the First Folio not been published, we would have lost The Tempest and Twelfth Night. We would have lost Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. I shudder to think that these plays could so easily have vanished.
One of my treasured possessions is this playhouse, of course. These walls are part of history, a small part of the river of literacy that courses through our civilization. But I could assemble players on any grassy field and what would I have without the plays themselves, without the words?
I treasure my First Folio even more than these walls.
My daughter thinks it is gone, sold, but Dez, behold the key in your hand. It is the backup key to the vault in the cellar. I know you think it is empty, as it was. You may have even forgotten it by now. But go downstairs. Yes, now! Open it—the combination is 22, 14, 36, 2. The key turns to the left.
Dez glanced out at the crowd, the mood turned palpably awkward.
The Folio will be well-wrapped in its special cloths; the air in the vault is quite dry. It is time, now that you’ve done your part, to let the playgoers see this gem again.
Take good care, good people, of this book, which must endure, this little mirror held up to all that is both fair and foul in our world.
—WILLIAM ALOYSIUS HART, DECEMBER 1934
A murmuring started, and grew louder. Dez unfolded the second letter and skimmed it. It was full of words of love and sorrow that she read with a spreading sense of disappointment. She had sacrificed her independence, she had entered into a marriage, because she loved her father, because making sacrifices was what human beings did for each other. But he had never sold the First Folio at all. No, he had let her marry Asa, and then spent his last days focusing on this final theatrical drama, this grand, sweeping gesture that was supposed to have made a great point, but in the end, only illustrated human frailty.
The letter closed:
I couldn’t let it go. You understand, don’t you?
Dez thought back. Rose must have known. She must have slipped the Folio into the vault long after Dez cleaned it of the few remaining dollar bills left inside. And Rose wasn’t able to warn Dez, because by the time Dez moved the playhouse, Rose, too, was gone.
41
AND SOMETHING BECOMES SOMETHING ELSE
The day after the grand reopening, after James left on the morning train, Dez traveled to the place that had been Cascade, Massachusetts, for 121 years, intending to do studies for a series of murals. She was full of determined ambition that day, and filled a dozen sheets of oversize linen hard-stock with sketches, notes, details, and color samples, intending to start on the series as soon as she got back to New York. She didn’t know that she would not actually execute the Cascade Murals until the end of her life; didn’t know that she would paint them not on canvas, but on the walls of the Lenox Theatre Institute, which she would endow in the early 1980s.
All she knew on that day after the grand reopening was that she wanted to sort out a few things. She wanted to sort out how she felt about what her father had done. She wanted to sort out what Jacob had meant to her. And she wanted to capture a larger sense of what had happened to Cascade.
Albert drove her up Route 13, through crisp morning air that promised an early autumn, the road dappled with light. At Cascade Lookout, he lifted her easel from the trunk—the easel that Walter Munroe, dead two years now, had built with such care, carrying it to the edge of the overlook while Dez set up her brushes and paint box on the chest-high wall that separated the lookout from the water-filled valley below. She would be good for two or three hours, she told him.
Below, the reservoir stretched for mi
les, its surface broken only once, by a single island. The water authority had erected a placard that pointed out that this island was really the hill that had once risen behind the train station in Cascade’s town center. A grainy photograph, mounted under thick plastic, revealed the view as it had looked in July 1935.
By gauging her distance from the island and comparing it with the photograph, Dez worked out where her childhood home had stood. If she squinted, she could almost see the steeple of the Round Church rising over pines that were no longer there, could almost see the cemetery with its weathered stones and moss-covered crosses that had once been mute testament to permanence.
And somewhere to the left, far below the surface, would be the playhouse’s stone foundation. Inside that foundation, behind the shale imposter’s wall, locked in the Victor Manganese Steel Vault with Triple Time Lock, would be the First Folio. It would have bloated with water years ago, disintegrating year by year.
I couldn’t let it go. You understand, don’t you?
No, yes. There were so many ways she could answer that question, but only one made sense: too much time had passed. The players had long left the stage. She had to believe that he—and Rose, too—had truly thought she would have married Asa anyway, that she was better off married and cared for.
But she wondered if, in some afterlife, her father saw the futility of what he’d done. Because trying to hold on to things was uncertain. You lost control when you died. You had no idea whether what you cared about would go into a museum or into a rubbish bin.
And who could say whether saving anything mattered? Mightn’t it be effort that mattered most? People were compelled—she was compelled—to try to mark existence, and would even if something cataclysmic happened, more of the earth blasted away, like at Hiroshima, like Cole’s Course of Empire series. And the world had to start back at its beginnings.
Here, it was easy to imagine such a world. From this vantage point, there was not a sign of civilization—no car on the access road far to the left, no view of the water authority building, nor the apparatus that pumped thousands of gallons of water a day one hundred miles to Boston. The Rapahannock was as pristine and still as it might have appeared to the first settlers who found Indians living on this land.
Yet down there was the same space on earth where she had, so many Thursdays, waited for the sound of Jacob’s truck coming up River Road. She could still feel that catch in her chest, that alertness. Hadn’t she felt it last night, in spite of herself, when she turned and saw him beneath the pines? Before marrying James, she had confided in Abby—she still thought about Jacob, and was that fair to James? “You’ll always think about Jacob,” Abby had said. “Because he was forbidden. He was exotic. But if you’d lived with him, the mystique would have been long gone.”
Dez had conceded that that might well have been true. That she might have been feeding a fantasy all those years. But now she and Jacob had seen each other again. The invisible thread, stretched and tangled as it had become, had shown itself to be unbroken.
She took up her brush. She couldn’t think about that. Without events unfolding as they had, she would not have painted the Shakespeare series and The Black Veil. She might have created something equally as good, as deeply and internally satisfying, as unique to her soul as her thumbprint to her skin, but she couldn’t be sure, and since she couldn’t be sure, she had to be content with the life she’d lived and how she had lived it.
The light had begun to grow more liquid; she hurried to prepare her paints, laying on some fast color washes, setting rough compositions, establishing the base colors, the peculiar milky light. Now that the trees were gone, the sky was big, like the Western skies she had heard described and had seen in paintings and photographs, but not yet seen for herself.
She could capture that big sky, but how to capture the fact that water covered a town, just swallowed everyone up, encouraged people to move, to change, to do things they might not otherwise have done?
She thought of Asa, digging out Secret Pond, trying to fight off the inevitable. She thought of Dr. Proulx, breathing his ether-soaked rag to escape it. She thought of the Round Church, and all those prayers voiced into all those Sunday mornings, thought of Pearl Harbor sending neutrality right out the window.
Change was the only constant, a river coursing through the present, turning it exhilarating and unknown. Even now—though her hand and brush tried to keep up—even now the light was changing. It moved one step ahead of her, beckoning.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I took some liberties with historic facts. In reality, a reservoir would not have been built as quickly as my novel built the fictional Rappahannock, but the basic elements, although speeded up, are true. Other truths: the Roper Poll that dismays Dez in 1935 was an actual Roper Poll in 1939. Henry Clay Folger did die soon after the cornerstone for his Folger Shakespeare library was laid in Washington DC, but in 1930, not 1934.
I used period photographs, news clippings, essays, reservoir construction literature, and art books published before 1935 to imagine myself into the time period. I would like to acknowledge those sources I found helpful:
After Picasso, James Thrall Soby (Edwin Valentine Mitchell, 1935).
American Chronicle: Six Decades in American life, 1920–1980, Lois Gordon, Alan Gordon (Atheneum, 1987).
A New Deal for the Arts, Bruce I. Bustard (National Archives & Record Service, 1997).
Changing New York, The Complete WPA Project, Berenice Abbott, ed. Bonnie Yochelson (The New Press, 2008).
Documenting America, 1935–1943, Lawrence W. Levine, Alan Trachtenberg, Carl Fleischhauer, Beverly W. Brannan (University of California Press, 1988).
Gramma Remembers New England, William O. Thomson (Old Saltbox Publishing, 1986).
Historic Quabbin Hikes, J.R. Greene (Highland Press, 1994).
Just Looking: Essays on American Art, John Updike (MFA Publications, 2000).
Modern American Painting, Peyton Boswell (Dodd Mead, 1940).
Quabbin: A History and Explorers Guide, Michael Tougias (On Cape Publications, 2002).
Quabbin Facts & Figures, Friends of Quabbin, Inc. & Metropolitan District Commission, Division of Watershed Management (1991).
The 1930s: The Hulton Getty Picture Collection, Nick Yapp (Konemann, 1998).
The Amateur Artist, F. Delamotte (Frederick J. Drake & Co., 1906).
The Creation of Quabbin Reservoir, J.R. Greene (The Transcript Press, 1981).
The Friends of Quabbin, Inc., a society dedicated to preserving the memory of the lost towns, and fostering appreciation for the unique place of beauty that the Quabbin Reservoir has become.
The Restless Decade: John Gutmann’s Photographs of the Thirties, Max Kozloff, Lew Thomas (Harry N. Abrams, 1996).
Understanding Modern Art, Morris Davidson (Tudor Publishing, 1934).
www.realcolorwheel.com A comprehensive art instruction website by the artist Don Jusko.
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