—Here we are, he said.
Shuffling back, he handed me what he’d rummaged from the bureau’s bottom drawer.
It was a black leather case about twelve inches square and three inches tall with a small, brass clasp—like a larger version of what might hold a double strand of pearls. The similarity wasn’t a coincidence, I suppose. Because at the knee-high height of my father’s fame, when he was a leading man in a small Shakespearean troupe performing to half-filled houses, he had six of these cases and they were his prized possessions.
Though the gold embossing on this one was chipped and faint, you could still make out the O of Othello. Throwing the clasp, I opened the lid. Inside were four objects resting snuggly in velvet-lined indentations: a goatee, a golden earring, a small jar of blackface, and a dagger.
Like the case, the dagger had been custom made. The golden hilt, which had been fashioned to fit perfectly in my old man’s grasp, was adorned with three large jewels in a row: one ruby, one sapphire, one emerald. The stainless steel blade had been forged, tempered, and burnished by a master craftsman in Pittsburgh, allowing my father in act three to cut a wedge from an apple and stick the dagger upright into the surface of a table, where it would remain ominously as he nursed his suspicions of Desdemona’s infidelity.
But while the steel of the blade was the real McCoy, the hilt was gilded brass and the jewels were paste. And if you pressed the sapphire with your thumb, it would release a catch, so that when my old man stabbed himself in the gut at the end of act five, the blade would retract into the hilt. As the ladies in the loge gasped, he would take his own sweet time staggering back and forth in front of the footlights before finally giving up his ghost. Which is to say, the dagger was as much a gimmick as he was.
When the set of six cases was still complete, each had its own label embossed in gold: Othello, Hamlet, Henry, Lear, Macbeth, and—I kid you not—Romeo. Each case had its own velvet-lined indentations holding its own dramatic accessories. For Macbeth these included a bottle of fake blood with which to smear his hands; for Lear a long gray beard; for Romeo a vial of poison, and a small jar of blush that could no more obscure the ravages of time on my old man’s face than the crown could obscure the deformities of Richard III.
Over the years, the collection of my father’s cases had slowly diminished. One had been stolen, another misplaced, another sold. Hamlet was lost in a game of five-card stud in Cincinnati, appropriately to a pair of kings. But it was not a coincidence that Othello was the last of the six, for it was the one my old man prized most. This was not simply because he had received some of his best reviews for his performance as the Moor, but because on several occasions the jar of blackface had secured him a timely exit. Sporting the uniform of a bellhop and the face of Al Jolson, he would carry his own luggage off the elevator and through the lobby, right past the debt collectors, or angry husbands, or whoever happened to be waiting among the potted palms. To have left the Othello case behind, my old man must have been in quite a hurry. . . .
—Yes, I said while closing the lid, this is my father’s. If you don’t mind my asking, how long have you been in the room?
—Oh, not long.
—It would be a great help if you could remember more precisely.
—Let’s see. Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday . . . Since Monday, I believe. Yes. It was Monday.
In other words, my old man had pulled up stakes the day after we left Salina—having received, no doubt, a worrisome call from a worried warden.
—I do hope you find him.
—Of that I can assure you. Anyway, sorry for the bother.
—It wasn’t a bother at all, the old gent replied, gesturing toward his bed. I was only reading.
Ah, I thought, seeing the corner of the book poking out from the folds of his sheets. I should have known. The poor old chap, he suffers from the most dangerous addiction of all.
* * *
? ? ?
As I was headed back toward the stairs, I noticed a slice of light on the hallway floor, suggesting that the door to room 49 was ajar.
After hesitating, I passed the stairwell and continued down the hall. When I reached the room, I stopped and listened. Hearing no sounds within, I nudged the door with a knuckle. Through the gap, I could see that the bed was empty and unmade. Guessing the occupant was in the bathroom at the other end of the hall, I opened the door the rest of the way.
When my old man and I first came to the Sunshine Hotel in 1948, room 49 was the best one in the house. Not only did it have two windows at the back of the building, where it was quiet, in the center of the ceiling was a Victorian light fixture with a fan—the only such amenity in the whole hotel. Now all that hung from the ceiling was a bare bulb on a wire.