Cascade (41 page)

“Never thought I’d see myself divorced,” he said.

She tried to show, with all the powers of expression her face was capable of, just how sorry she was. “But thank you so much for taking care of the playhouse, for letting all this happen.”

He was incredulous. “Did you really think I’d let it be destroyed?”

She shrugged. She didn’t know. It was hard enough to really know yourself, to know what you were capable of, never mind another person.

The coffeepot started its faint rumbling. “This pot takes forever,” he said.

“Forget the coffee. Show me the new cemetery,” she said, to take their minds off what was bad, to turn their minds to what was worse. “Drive me there, will you?”

The state had tried its best to make the new cemetery glorious, magnificent. The landscaping was composed of hedges and flowering trees and pebble-stoned paths named Azalea and Gardenia that connected clusters of plots to clusters of plots, each cluster presided over by leafy oaks and maples, all designed to beautify the ugly fact that souls resting for years were dug up by gravediggers, that rotting coffins were moved under cover of night to be furtively and hastily reburied by morning.

Dez fretted that she should have been there when they moved her family, but Asa assured her: the board in charge of doing the moving had insisted that families not be involved. “The digging up and the reburying wasn’t always as neat as they’d hoped,” he said, then apologized. “They didn’t want to upset people.”

Still. To think that she hadn’t known where her family’s remains were the last few weeks. She stood over their headstones, situated near a maple sapling on Peony Path.
William Aloysius Hart, 1864–1934. Caroline Haywood Hart, 1884–1918. Timon William Hart, 1910–1918.
Lives defined and reduced by a bracketing of numbers.

Once someone was dead awhile, it was hard to believe they’d really existed. Dead was dead. Past was past. Yet the processing of the centuries would go on.
Desdemona Hart Spaulding, 1908–

Timon’s eight years looked negligible on stone. They were slim digits that in no way conveyed that his eight years had seemed longer because they had also seemed endless. Timon’s skin had been darker than his
sister’s, his hair white-blond with a cowlick that refused to flatten, even with pomade. He’d been a king at marbles and could run like the devil. He’d had a talent for the piano, too, just like their mother, but hadn’t liked her Brahms and Beethoven and instead insisted on making up his own, short, funny tunes with lyrics to match. A whole little life that had just—stopped.

“I don’t know that I want to be buried here,” Asa said. “I always assumed I’d be buried in Cascade, but I don’t think I want to be buried here.”

Dez had never, before this day, given a thought to where she might be buried. She almost asked, did it matter? But it did matter—to Asa, to his type of person.

“Addison’s will be good for you,” she said. “You’re still young. By the time you’re ready to retire, Belchertown will be home to you. You can be buried there.”

He seemed to take comfort in the idea.

On Elm Street, Asa whistled. “Will you look at that?” Parked in front of the playhouse sat a silver-blue Rolls-Royce. “That’s a Phantom,” he said. They caught up with Joe and Nancy, walking over from the hotel. “Asa Spaulding, legal owner of the playhouse,” Dez said, making introductions. “Joe Katz, Nancy Bracewell.” She felt a bit guilty, not identifying him as her husband, but she didn’t want to reveal any more of her private life to people than was necessary.

Inside, they met up with Elliot Lowell, who introduced them to James Lawrence King, Frank May, King’s attorney, the engineer Mark Whitman, and Dick Holt, the man who would supervise the move. James Lawrence King was not the imposing sort Dez expected but a tall, wiry man with a face set in a perpetual squint. He had a cordial yet distracted way of talking and got right down to business, his quiet authority evident when Lowell tried to orchestrate a photograph. He stopped him with a gesture. “No pictures yet.”

He wasn’t the type to do more than oversee a project, but he wanted to check that the building was sound before signing the deal and arranging for its move to Lenox. They toured the building for more than an hour, with King directing most of his questions to Dez. Were there ever any major maintenance problems? No. How extensive was the prop collection? Complete, as far as she knew, for all of the major plays. King’s interest was focused firmly on the theater, not at all on her, but for the first time since Jacob, she felt that fluttering of mild panic, that giddy rumbling of attraction. It didn’t make sense. He had a mouth like a gash; he had to be at least fifty.

They assembled back in the vestibule, where the engineer declared the building sound. King said that once the playhouse was moved, they could worry about what to do with it, how best to reopen it, and that he would be in touch then. For the first time he turned his attention completely to Dez. “I take it I shall direct all future correspondence to you?” His eyes flickered across her face and he smiled warmly, lightly touching her arm. He had charm, she realized. The man had charm. Probably everyone responded positively to him.

“You are welcome to include any personal storage, within reason, of course,” he added, brushing aside her thanks. “If you would provide Dick with all of your pertinent information, I will be in touch as we move forward.” He turned to his lawyer. “Let’s get on with the signing, shall we? And your photograph, of course, Elliot.” He and Asa signed a sheaf of papers, then they posed with Lowell. Joe’s flashbulb popped, recording the moment, blinding them all.

King shook hands all around, and then he was gone.

It took Dez two days to oversee the packing-up, but Dick Holt hired locals to help her, so aside from sorting her own belongings at the house, which she did while Asa was at the drugstore, she had very little physical work to do. She’d forgotten how much easier life was with help, with money to pay people. She packed her father’s old steamer trunk with
mementos and added it to her personal storage. Her things would be safe in Lenox; she could worry about what to do with them one day when she was more settled.

Her last day in the playhouse, she walked around with Dick Holt. The costumes were packed away in cedar wardrobes, props wrapped in newspaper and boxed up. The drapes had come down, the autographed pictures carefully wrapped away. All had been boxed and stacked, ready to be trucked to Lenox.

Their footsteps echoed up to the rafters. “That’s it,” Dick said.

Dez ticked off a list of final places to check: basement, crawl space above the balcony, backstage wardrobes.

“We seem to have gotten everything,” Dick said.

“There’s a cupboard behind the balcony, though.”

“Checked.”

“How about the basement?” It was spidery and dark and pretty much empty down there.

“We cleaned the old staging out, but other than that it was empty.”

“There’s a big safe in the basement,” she said. “Hidden behind an imposter wall.”

“Found that.”

“I guess it wasn’t so hidden after all.”

“We figured it was empty but I had it on my list to ask you. Is it?”

“It is. Plus it had a backup key and I have no idea where that is. I don’t suppose we need to cart it away.”

“It’d be heavy,” Dick said. “Besides, Mr. King ain’t the kind of man needs a safe.” He laughed at his little joke.

Dez looked around one last time, then walked outside and stood on the front path, letting the years of memories wash over her. She tried not to get emotional but she knew that an era was irrevocably past, that it would be the last time she laid eyes on the playhouse in Cascade, the last time she would turn from its front door and see where their old house had once stood. Her eyes brimmed, her throat ached, and this time she
didn’t fight the emotion. This was what happened—when circumstances changed, when people died. Sometimes you had to give in to it.

Joe Katz took a picture of her by the front door. He had her rest her hand on the railing. He adjusted a number of settings, told her to hold her smile, and snapped the shutter. “Will it really work?” she asked Dick, suddenly nervous about the move. “I would think a building would fall apart once it’s pulled from its foundation.”

Dick laughed. “You’d be surprised how solid buildings are,” he said.

Nancy and Joe spent the rest of the day finishing up their story and photo projects. Dez went out with her sketchpad, too. Over the course of her time in Cascade, she had jotted down ideas for the final destruction postcard, but now she realized they were too much fire and brimstone, too much the sum of all the cards she had already done. Mainly she wanted the right tone. She wanted something simple. A placard posted to the front of Stein’s store announced the Farewell Ball to be held at Town Hall, which would be one of the last structures to come down. The ball would take place on the evening of June 28, 1936. At midnight, bells would toll and disincorporation would be official. That would be her card, she decided.
The Farewell Ball
.

Over dinner, she asked Nancy and Joe about their upcoming marriage—did their families mind a mixed marriage, did they foresee problems with children?

They glanced at each other with the kind of intimate, communicative look that said,
Here come the kind of small-minded questions we’re ready for
.

“No, no—” Dez wanted them to know where her questions came from, that she wasn’t what they thought.

But Nancy was cold, her disinterest bordering on dislike. During their time in Cascade, they had all heard the news: Germany had passed a new set of laws that imposed limits on citizenship and civil rights for German Jews.

Dez did not want to be perceived as bigoted, but the more she tried to explain, the less Nancy understood. “Never mind,” she finally said. “I
wasn’t trying to pry.” She almost didn’t voice what she said next, but it felt remarkably freeing to do so, and she said it and walked away without waiting for a reaction. “It’s just that I was once in love with a Jewish man and I sometimes wonder how it would have turned out.”

The last day in Cascade, Dez woke up early, before the sun was fully up. She stood by her hotel-room window, with its view to the common. In the misty half-light, the bulldozers and tree stumps and gaping holes took on a strange beauty, so different from her painting, and she remembered that this hour before full sun was twilight, too; twilight in fact happened twice each day.