Cascade (2 page)

She slid the baking sheet into the oven, where the meringues would spend hours drying out. Then she washed up the bowl, the beaters, the spoon. She set everything on the draining board and paused by the window to catch her breath. Outside, the day was grim and overcast, a few stray snowflakes starting to drift down from the sky. It was the kind of day that would turn to night without fanfare, with a gradual extinguishing of light, the kind of day that pierced you with melancholy and reminded you it was only December, that a whole winter had still to be gotten through.

And what would spring bring? What once seemed an interim, a transitory phase only, was dragging on into endless day-to-day existence. What the country had named the Depression wasn’t getting much better, and a lot of people were starting to worry that maybe the United States of America was one big experiment that had failed. You could feel it in the streets, in the very air—no one had any idea what was going to happen. The future was one big void they were all stepping into. Every night, Asa came home with more bad news picked up in the drugstore: the Cascade Hotel had closed another floor, Warren Estes was closing the boating supplies shop for good, turning the Water Street property into a filling station. Their once-fashionable resort town with its pleasant waters was looking more and more like the ghost valley that was invading dreams and even the pages of her sketchpad. She had done half a dozen studies: the drowning person’s blurred upward view from the bottom of a flooded place. The bleary, uncertain light. The smooth stones, long grasses, and someone struggling through thick river mud, Ophelia-like, trying to find a place to breathe.

The banjo clock began its low, rhythmic chiming and she turned from the window. Eleven o’clock. Her father would nap for hours now, Rose wouldn’t be back today, and if she was lucky, she could make real, uninterrupted headway on her new piece.

A
t first she assumed he was a hobo. They sometimes hopped off the trains and mooched around town for food. The man on the porch had that same hungry look, but he was clean-shaven, wore a pressed gray suit, and carried a large satchel. A jalopy Dez hadn’t seen for months sat in the driveway behind him: black with big fenders and bug-eye headlights, faded gold lettering on the door:
Sid Solomon Wares
.

Dez remembered hearing Ethel Bentonford in the Handy Grocery, back in September, clucking her tongue.
Did you hear the old Jew-man died? He was a nice man, too. I miss the truck coming around. You get to depending on them.

The man on the porch introduced himself as Jacob Solomon. He didn’t wear the stovepipe hat his father used to wear, nor the little black skullcap beneath it, but a gray flannel trilby that he removed and tucked under his arm when she said how sorry she was to hear about his father. He was slight and somewhat self-effacing, at first glance almost nondescript, a person you might describe by saying he had dark hair. But his eyes were
keen and watchful as he took in first her face, and then her smock and paintbrush at the instant she realized her brush was about to drip. Then, a small commotion, laughter, cupping one hand under the other to rush back to her studio, where he examined her canvas, a winter study of the buildings facing Cascade Common, at twilight.

“If you add a layer of gesso mixed with a little powdered charcoal,” he said, “you’ll get streaky, translucent shadows that will really suit what you’re doing, I think.”

His advice was matter-of-fact, confident, and she turned to look more closely at him, to marvel, really, to see who in Cascade could possibly know such a thing. Then she remembered Sid, on his rounds, talking about an artist son.
He is in New York. He is in Spain. He is in Germany with his mother’s people now, painting who knows what. Great things, that I know
. She hadn’t paid too much attention to Mr. Solomon—so many people bombarded you with anecdotes about their sons and brothers when you told them you painted. But now she thought about it, she remembered he had also said that his son had
taught
art classes. In New York.

An hour went by like the wind, an hour that was a back-and-forth comparing of experiences—where they’d done their training, and with whom, and where they’d traveled. (After New York, it had been Spain, Amsterdam, then Germany for him; she had gone from Provincetown to Paris.)

And then, in the kitchen, over a pot of coffee and some stale cigarettes Dez found in a drawer in Asa’s desk—while her father napped, while the meringues slowly dried, while the kitchen developed a remarkable coziness it usually lacked—they argued about who was good and who was great. Great was Goya, Jacob said, no question. Goya was the only reason he’d gotten on that crazy freight boat out of Brooklyn in the first place.

“Oh, but they’re so brutal!”

That amused him. “But don’t you see why? He’s conveying everything that’s usually so interior, so under the surface. He’s a genius at it. And his
use of light—” He stopped, lost in thought. “Well, you’d want to see them in person, of course, color plates can only convey so much.”

He drew deeply on his cigarette, held the smoke, then let it out with a troubled sigh. “But who knows when any of us will see them again? Things were getting unpleasant all over Europe by the time I left.” He stubbed out the cigarette as Dez thought back on Paris—how close that beloved place was to the unrest they were starting to hear about. You hoped nothing would come of it all—men had surely had their fill of war after the last one. Still, there was that nagging sense of worry.

A thump on the ceiling brought them back to the kitchen, to the cups of coffee, drunk down to dregs, to the saucer Dez had set out as ashtray, gray with ash, Jacob’s open satchel sitting by the chair. He had sales to make; she needed to get upstairs to tend to her father. But first, she thought, well, they had to arrange to meet again.

“Y
ou changed your will?” Was that what he’d just said? Her father, back in bed after the exertion of a walk, was mumbling, and when she swung around from hanging his cardigan to look directly at him, he hemmed and hawed and finally admitted that he had given the playhouse to Asa, back in October, after their wedding. “As a dowry of sorts.”

She blinked. She stood up a little straighter. “Are you joking? And the two of you kept this a secret from me?”

“No secret, my girl.” He tried to speak matter-of-factly, jovially. “Just business between men.”

With that, she walked over to the window and laid her forehead against the cold glass. Outside, the snow had begun to fall thicker, faster. The unexpected hour with Jacob Solomon had left her preoccupied; she’d let her father have his way when he insisted on taking a walk outside, even though Dr. Proulx had said no to outdoor ventures. He’d headed straight to the bench at the end of the lawn for a clear view across the river to the town common, where their old house and his theater sat diagonally across
from each other. As he’d rattled on about the playhouse, she hadn’t paid much attention, but now she realized he must have been looking for a way to break this news to her.

“You actually put the deed in Asa’s name? Why would you do such a thing?”

His face flooded with blood. “I couldn’t come here empty-handed,” he said bitterly, “like some drifter, no better than a hobo. I am a bankrupt, Desdemona.”

“Oh, Dad.” In all these months, he’d never used the phrase. Not in spring, while she was still in Boston and he was scraping money together to pay the mortgage he had taken out after the first of the staggering financial-market losses. Not when he broke down and sold his beloved First Folio and everything else in the Shakespeare collection. Even after the foreclosure on their home, he had never used that phrase.

A bankrupt
. He hadn’t actually had to declare legal bankruptcy—by selling everything else he’d managed to skid to that precipice and stop before the playhouse went over the cliff, too. “First of all, you are not a bankrupt. And I can understand how you felt, of course I can, but to give it away after all you sacrificed to save it—”

“I hardly gave it away. Asa’s your husband, after all. But I do have something else, just for you.” He gestured to his bureau, where one of his theater props—Portia’s casket—sat among a stack of books. Had Rose retrieved that from the playhouse?

Portia’s casket was a small, leaden chest that he used for
Merchant of Venice
performances. When Dez carried it over to the bed, he pushed it back into her hands with purpose. “It’s for you.”

Odd, she thought. An odd choice of gift. In
The Merchant of Venice,
Portia is an heiress who is not free to decide whom she will marry—her father’s will has stipulated that the suitor who wins her must choose the box—gold, silver, or lead—that contains her portrait.

“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.