“Ned gets everything,” Johnny says.
Edwin’s face and hands are cold. The log in the fireplace falls with a whisper into ash. He moves closer to the fire and farther from his mother. One cheek warms; the other does not. He remembers how Mother once asked the flames to reveal Johnny’s fate and he makes a silent prayer to know his own. No response from the reddened coals. Across the dark room, the lace curtains flutter suddenly as if a breeze or a ghost has entered.
“It has to be you,” Mother says to him. She reminds him that June used to travel with Father sometimes, but now he has his own family and career. She’d thought Father was doing fine alone, but now they all know that Richard was with him and clearly, Richard can’t be asked to travel with Father again. Father’s truly on his own this time and only catastrophe can follow.
The family depends entirely on Father’s wages. If he continues to miss half his curtains or to spend his money the very night he earns it, they’ll soon find themselves on the street or in the factories. Edwin must go along and keep him out of trouble. This is a job no one can do, and there is no one but Edwin to do it.
Mother has made it clear that Edwin has no choice in the matter and yet he can feel how much she wants him to agree. He considers denying her this, and it’s not her tragic face and voice that finally make him speak up. Face and voice are the actor’s tools and anguish can be easily feigned. It’s her hands, the counterfeit wedding band, the worn nails just at his eye level, resting on Johnny’s black hair. Something about his mother’s hands, red in the firelight, moves Edwin to a terrible kindness. “I’ll go,” he says.
For many years now, Rosalie’s job has been to save her mother. From this day forward, Edwin’s job will be the saving of the whole family. This is a job no one can do, and there is no one but Edwin to do it.
“No fair,” Johnny says.
Lincoln and the Whigs at Sprigg’s
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1848
Lincoln has married the woman he said it would kill him to marry. They have two young sons and he’s come to Washington, DC, to represent the good people of Illinois in Congress. The city is unfinished, yet already decaying. The Potomac is choked green with algae and the smell of dead fish permeates. Dead cats rot on the streets. Still! Washington!
They take rooms at Ann Sprigg’s boardinghouse, where more than twenty other Whigs are already in residence. Restless, ambitious, Lincoln wants to see and do everything. But Mary finds it hard to keep their young sons entertained. She quarrels with the other boarders, demands that Lincoln take her side in all things. He feels a guilty relief when she takes the boys to her family’s home in Kentucky.
Sprigg’s is known locally as Abolition House. Those slaves that work for Ann Sprigg disappear north with mysterious regularity. The Whigs residing there see the Mexican War as a mere ruse for expanding the slaveholding territories. James Polk is president. In a grand tradition reaching back through the centuries, he insists that war was forced upon him by unprovoked aggression. He seizes huge swaths of the West as recompense.
Lincoln takes to the floor of the House to accuse Polk of lying. He demands to know the exact spot on which the first gun was fired, the first blood shed. Wasn’t it, in fact, on Mexican soil? The word spot is repeated many times during this speech. Later he hears himself referred to as “spotty Lincoln.”
Back in Illinois, folks are surprised by his attack on Polk. Even those who opposed the war find his speeches close to treason. Lincoln is surprised in return. He supported every measure to fund and supply American troops without condition or argument. The Democrats cynically conflated that with support for the war itself.
Lincoln abhorred the war and admired the soldiers. How hard is that to understand?
There is a second principle at stake. The power to declare war rests only with Congress.
The Illinois State Register, which once supported Lincoln, now says that he has demeaned the courage and sacrifice of Illinois’ fighting men. When the Whigs lose the seat, the paper suggests Lincoln’s obituary—“Died of Spotted Fever.”
* * *
xi
Almost the first thing that happens is Edwin nearly losing his father. The month is August, the year 1848, and Father has a weeklong engagement in Albany, playing Othello one night, Iago another, Edward Mortimer, and then Sir Giles Overreach. On the 18th, he is scheduled to finish the run with Richard III, performed as a benefit. That’s when the real money should arrive.
Edwin is finding his way into this new life. He looks younger than his fourteen years, thin and pale, with hooded eyes. The women in the cast make a pet of him, treating him as more of a child than he feels, which he likes and dislikes in equal measure. These women are bold and loud and touch him often, stroking his hair, taking his hand and running a finger over his wrist. He might be less uncomfortable if his father weren’t there, one moment paying no attention and the next, seeing everything. Father either disapproves or is amused. Knowing Father, it’s probably both. Edwin can’t tell which he dislikes more.
Edwin aims for an unimpeachable professionalism. He stands in the wings, reading along in case his father needs a prompt or a sip of water. He manages the trunks and costumes, the entrances and exits. Nothing distracts him. For years, he hasn’t been allowed to see his father act. Now it seems he does nothing but. He begins to notice when his father tries out a new gesture or an intonation. He sees the parts that never change. He begins to feel that he can tell, as the audience clearly cannot, when his father is bored, which is often.
The afternoon of the 17th, Edwin goes out looking for newspapers. His father likes to take his tea with the day’s death notices. He’s made it about four blocks from the Eagle Hotel, when he begins to smell smoke. He doesn’t think anything of this at first, but the smell grows stronger and soon he sees the smoke as well, coiling above the harbor, spreading, thickening. More and more people appear on the sidewalks. At first, they merely watch, asking each other quietly what is happening. Fire, of course. Obviously. But how big? How close?
Edwin couldn’t say who starts the panic. One minute, everyone seems calm and the next, they are all shouting at each other, running back towards their houses or else up the street. Soon, like a flock of birds or a school of fish, they’ve settled on their singular direction, out of the city, away from the fire. A bearded man in a tall top hat seizes Edwin’s arm as he runs past. “Come with me,” he cries, and it costs Edwin a wrenched wrist to break free.
Edwin is running back towards the hotel, moving with difficulty against the flow as the pavement fills with people. An oncoming family—mother and father, each with a child in their arms and another on their back—forces him into the middle of the street, where the horses have caught the contagion of alarm. A few feet away, a young Negro fights the reins against a large white horse. While he grapples for control, an older white boy takes advantage of his inattention to lift three children into the back of his cart, climb aboard himself. The horse nearly steps on Edwin, who pushes his way back into the crowd.