More time passes and Edwin will stop telling these stories. His father’s oddities were most painful to Father himself. “It’s not for the son to lay bare what the sire would have wished concealed,” Edwin will say. “I have no interest in merely satisfying the curious or making the unskilled laugh.”
* * *
—
Edwin’s schooling ceases—he will feel disadvantaged by this for the rest of his life. But he sees much of the country as they move from hotel to hotel, theater to theater. His father performs in Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, New York City, Louisville, New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah. Edwin picks up regional accents, mingles with people in fair straits and foul, enslaved and free, immigrant and native. He hones his gift for invisibility. Mostly, he watches Father.
He learns that there is to be no escape. One March, an illness keeps Edwin home. Already he’s become an interloper in his own family, awkward with them and they awkward in return. Johnny is mostly absent at this time, and so is Joe, both at school at the Bel Air Academy. Joe boards there. Johnny rides back and forth daily, leaving early and arriving home again late. It’s hoped that this tutelage will keep him from getting into the kind of scrape no one gets out of. Johnny never intends to worry his mother, but he can’t seem to help himself.
Mother, Rosalie, and Asia remain at home. Edwin sees how pretty Asia is, how tired Mother looks, how strange Rose has been allowed to become. He sees them all with outsider eyes.
Being ill fixes everything by giving everyone a role to play, and Edwin luxuriates in his sisters fussing about him, in clean sheets, damp cloths, hushed voices. Asia runs up and down the stairs with cups of tea made from mint she picked herself. Rosalie reads Jane Eyre aloud, sunlight streaming through the windows, casting a silhouette of tree branches onto the scarred wood floor. One passage hits Rosalie and Edwin very differently:
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.
The sun is gone and Rosalie fallen quiet. Edwin realizes that he slept through the last bit and he opens his mouth to tell Rosalie she needs to read that again, but Rosalie speaks first. In her usual whispering voice, she says, “I begin to wonder if I’ll ever marry.”
Edwin closes his mouth. Surely this issue has been settled for quite some time, ever since the lion tamer, if not before. Rosalie is twenty-six years old （or maybe twenty-seven, Edwin has lost track）。 Is it really possible she doesn’t know she’ll never marry? She’s told the Cole sisters the story of Jacob Driesbach and her forbidden love, and they were so moved that they each knitted a muffler for Rosalie to give him when they are finally together, one blue, one red. Rosalie keeps these in a trunk, wrapped in linen and scented with dried rosemary. They’re a secret from Mother and Father, but no one keeps a secret from Asia.
Edwin used to feel that Mother was too indulgent with Rosalie, that she should have been forced to stand up straight, forced from the house and out into the world. His time with Father has made him reassess. Maybe Mother is the one keeping Rosalie at home. Maybe, with nothing but love in her heart, his darling mother has eaten Rosalie alive. This seems to be something parents sometimes do.
His throat is so sore it hurts to swallow. His nose runs constantly and has chafed from frequent blowing. His eyes itch, and fever makes his joints ache, turns his thoughts glassy and distant. But he’s lying in his very own bed, cared for and carefree. Outside his window, the thin upper branches of a sycamore bob. A silvery squirrel is making its way upwards. Edwin’s completely contented. “You can come and live with me,” he says. “If you never marry.” He even thinks he means this.
Meanwhile in Richmond, Richard III commences with Father nowhere to be found.
* * *
—
Edwin writes:
Baltimore, April 8th, 1850
Mr. Sefton. Dear Sir: Will you be kind enough to inform me if my Father is in Richmond, and whether he is ill, for we’ve not heard a word from him since he left here. I see by the Richmond paper Friday that he was not announced to play that night. We feel anxious to know something about him. Answer this by return of mail and oblige Yours truly, Edwin Booth In Haste
Mr. Sefton answers curtly, by return post, that Father never arrived.
Edwin must rise from his sickbed, take the train to Virginia, and search. When Father is finally found at a nearby plantation, drunk and penniless, Edwin must borrow fifty dollars to get them to his next engagement. He never does learn who the mad arsonist in Rochester’s attic is.
* * *
—
Under Edwin’s watch, Father never misses a curtain. But keeping him from the saloons after the shows, when his adrenaline is high and his thirst powerful, is impossible. A typical evening commences with a gesture Edwin quickly comes to recognize, a sort of chopping movement with one hand, a sign that Edwin is to go away.
Instead, he follows his father through the darkened streets, always at a distance but always in sight, until his father chooses a door, a stool, a glass. The more his father has to drink, the angrier Edwin’s presence makes him. He shouts for Edwin to go back to their room, threatens to leave him in one city or another, have him kidnapped into the navy or arrested or sold into an apprenticeship. “My jailor,” he tells his latest crew of drunken friends, pointing an accusing, Shakespearean finger in Edwin’s direction. “My chain, my manacles. I once offered to sell him for a fiver. No takers, more’s the sorrow.
“？‘Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.’ Get out!” he shouts, his famous voice perfectly tuned to the key of contempt. Huddled on a chair at the far end of the room, Edwin might pretend he isn’t listening. He might even doze off to lists of his shortcomings, almost as if he were counting sheep. Acquaintances describe Edwin at this time as fragile and pale, his cheeks sunken, his eyes too old for his age. He never smiles, they say. He never speaks. He lives like a servant.
Sometimes his father gives him the slip and Edwin is forced to search, bar by bar, through the night. Sometimes the streets are deserted. Sometimes groups of men stagger by. Sometimes women in doorways call to him, tell him how pretty he is and to go home to his mother before it’s too late. He begins to dream of running in a panic through dark streets in strange cities. In his dreams, he is not the pursuer. He is the pursued.
xiii
One August night in Boston, he visits seven taverns before finding his father. Gas lamps light the streets. His shadow stretches and shrinks across the pavement as he passes beneath them. The air is thick, mild, and windless, the stars brilliant. His father has just performed at the Boston Museum in the part of Shylock.
The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Edwin turns down a small alley and arrives at the famed Green Dragon. The round sign marking the tavern sways over the door. A man is just emerging and, mysteriously, appears to recognize him. He holds the door for Edwin and points towards the stairs. “In the basement,” he says. “Rare form tonight,” when in fact, Father’s state of pixilation is all too common.
Edwin descends the steps. There Father sits in a winged chair, his cravat loose, his blue jacket off, his vest unbuttoned from the bottom to make room for his stomach. A felt hat cups one knee. Edwin has never seen this hat before. He prepares to be shouted at. Instead, his father raises the hat, waving Edwin in, sliding over so that Edwin can take the arm of his chair. “Ned, Ned, my boy,” Father says, as if surprised and delighted by this happy meeting. “You’ll want to hear this.” His face is flushed, his eyes water.