He lies down on the settee and the last words he thinks before he sleeps are
“O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he.
He wakes when Asia and Johnny return from school. They’re as perplexed as he by Mother’s sudden departure. “Something must be wrong on the farm,” Asia says. “Maybe something happened to the Mitchells?” But whatever is wrong made Rosalie cry and she wouldn’t cry over the Mitchells. Edwin thinks it must be Ann or Joe Hall. Perhaps Rowland Rogers has sold away one of their children. That would certainly account for the tears. But it wouldn’t be a secret, no reason to keep it from the rest of the family, so this answer doesn’t really work either.
* * *
—
Nothing matters more than family, Father always says. Edwin makes a private vow to find Asia and Johnny less annoying in future. This lasts barely an hour, which is when Johnny calls him into the backyard. He’s grinning, the sun hitting his dark hair and turning it into golden shine. On the bench in the gazebo is a lumpy, jumpy, snarling flour sack. From it, Johnny carefully withdraws two cats. He’s tied them together in such an ingenious way that if either one struggles, it will slash the other with its claws. One of the cats is gray and starving, the skin between its ribs sunk as deep as Edwin’s finger. The other is black, plumper, a cared-for cat. Both are spitting and yowling, scrapping and bleeding. Father’s rule, that no creature is ever to be injured, is less clear in the city than it was on the farm. It’s less clear to Johnny than it is to Edwin.
Johnny is discriminating. He loves dogs. He hates cats. He loves horses. He hates squirrels. He sings sometimes to the frogs on the farm, but they all do that—“A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go,” which Mother taught them, or, from Ann, “Down by the Riverside.” An image from the time Johnny’s horse Blackie bit him rises in Edwin’s mind, Johnny’s face so full of his hurt feelings. When Johnny loves, he expects to be loved in return. Edwin has no such expectations.
“Let them loose,” Edwin says, “or you’ll see Father’s belt.”
“Only if you tell,” Johnny says, but he cuts the string with his pocketknife. The cats bolt, leaping the fence （the black one）， climbing a tree （the gray）。
Father appears briefly at dinnertime, but only partly as Father, and partly as someone midway between Edward Mortimer and the Stranger. He seems unsurprised by Mother’s absence, speaks very little, only saying wistfully that the big cherry tree on the farm will soon be budding and how sad it will be to miss that. If they were Japanese, they would go to the farm as a pilgrimage. So many things would be different if they were Japanese, Father says despondently.
Edwin waits to hear what these different things would be, but Father is apparently done with the Japanese. There are still traces of his stage make-up, particularly in the creases around his eyes. His eyes appear widened by it, as if he’s painted a kind of shock onto them. “We should all go to the farm,” Father says. “We were safe when we were on the farm.”
Then he heads to the theater again, leaving the children to manage their bedtimes for themselves. Staying up late in the sad quiet house has lost its allure and they don’t do it again.
* * *
—
Mother, Rosalie, and Joe return two days later. That evening, when Mother has shut herself in her bedroom, and Father is facing the opening curtain, Rosalie gathers the older children into the girls’ room to finally tell them as much as she knows. The important point is this one: Adelaide Booth, Father’s wife, has arrived from England and is hell-bent on destroying them all.
v
The children had always assumed that Mother was Father’s wife.
vi
Rosalie says that someone must have told Mrs. Booth that Mother was at the farm, because straight to the farm she’d come, in a hired carriage with a Negro driving, and then on foot, right through the gate and up to the cabin door, where she’d stood in the yard in her big black bonnet, spewing such dreadful names at Mother that nothing on this earth would compel Rosalie to repeat them. She was glad, she said, that none of them were there to hear it.
But farmhands working in the fields heard it. Neighbors on their porches heard it. Children in their graves heard it. “You can’t imagine the humiliation,” Rosalie says. Joe Hall had to loose the dogs to keep her from coming right into the cabin, which she informed them now belonged to her, both the cabin and the house on Exeter, too, and they had no legal right to keep her out of either one.
* * *
—
Rosalie is seated on her bed, her shoulders against the wall and her head pushed forward by the knot of her hair and the stoop of her spine. Her skirt, crinoline removed, spreads limply over the covers like a brown puddle. Asia sits cross-legged at the foot, facing her, and Johnny is stretched out next to her, his head on his arm. Both are lying on some part of her skirt, holding her by her wings like a pinned butterfly as she talks.
Edwin has taken a seat on the floor, which is cold, and either because of that or because he feels coiled so tight with tension, there is a tremor in his legs. He has wanted to know what’s going on, but now that he will, he wishes he wouldn’t.
He pulls his knees up to his chest, wrapping them in his arms until they are still. The light in the room is golden—The weary sun hath made a golden set—and Rosalie’s eyes shine with unshed tears; the bottom of her nose glistens. Edwin wishes he were older, the days about to come now safely in the past. The weary sun hath made a golden set, And by the bright track of his fiery car Gives token of a goodly day tomorrow. The someone who told that woman that Mother was at the farm? That someone was Edwin.
“I don’t see why we should feel humiliated,” Asia says. “It’s not as if we did anything wrong.”
* * *
—
When the shock has abated slightly, the children try to remember if they were ever actually told that their parents were married. They were certainly never told otherwise.
There seem now to be only three possibilities:
1. It’s all a lie and Father was never married to the woman calling herself Adelaide Booth.
This is the option Asia will choose. For the rest of her life, she will insist that Father and Mother married first and ran off to America after.
2. Father seduced and deceived Mother.
This is Johnny’s pick. He will decide that Father tricked Mother with a false wedding, that Mother was as stunned as the rest of them to learn she was unmarried. It’s a sentiment shared by their neighbors and friends. Mother has always struck everyone as every inch a lady. Father, on the other hand . . .
Johnny’s attachment to his mother will deepen. His feelings about his father will, from this time forward, carry an undercurrent of blame and anger.
3. Mother knowingly ran off with a married man.
Edwin is surprised to learn that Rosalie isn’t certain which of these options is true. He is even more surprised to learn that Rosalie is leaning towards number three.
Among the children, Rosalie feels the scandal most deeply. How often has Mother said she has no secrets from Rosalie? Mother is such a liar. Shame spreads like a fever through Rosalie’s body, making her cheeks hot, her hands cold. She adds this to the many reasons she already has for not leaving the house.